1 [[!meta title="Google Summer of Code 2010"]]
5 DragonFly BSD is planning to participate (pending acceptance) in the Google Summer of Code program for 2010.
8 Have a look at our SoC pages from [[2008|docs/developer/GoogleSoC2008/]] and [[2009|docs/developer/gsoc2009]] to get an overview about prior year's projects. The [Projects Page](/docs/developer/ProjectsPage/) is also a potential source of ideas.
11 For more details on Google's Summer of Code: [Google's SoC page](http://socghop.appspot.com/)
13 Note to prospective students: These project proposals are meant to be a first approximation; we're looking forward to your own suggestions (even for completely new directions) and will try to integrate your ideas to make the GSoC project more interesting to all parties. Even when a proposal is very specific about the goals that must be achieved and the path that should be taken, these are always negotiable. Keep in mind that we have tried to limit our proposals to those that (based on our past experience) are appropriate for the GSoC program.
17 * Prerequisites: knowledge that the student should have before starting the project. It may be possible to acquire the knowledge in the course of the project, but the estimated difficulty would increase substantially. On the bright side, you can expect to have a much deeper understanding of these fields (and gain some real-world experience) after you successfully complete the respective project.
18 * Difficulty: Estimated difficulty of the project, taking into account the complexity of the task and the time constraints of the GSoC program.
19 * Contact point: The person you should contact for any further information or clarifications.
23 ##### VFS Quota System
24 * Create a new kernel subsystem to manage quota's in a filesystem agnostic manner by interfacing with the kernel VFS layer.
25 * Create filesystem-agnostic quota support tools for userland that obtain information in the same manner as eg: du(1) instead of parsing the filesystem internals directly as the existing quota tools do (see quotacheck(8), repquota(8), edquota(8), ...).
26 * The quota file storage can be modeled after the existing UFS code that does the same, but should use the more general bytes, files and/or directories metrics instead of the somewhat UFS-specific blocks and inodes.
30 * Prerequisites: C, introductory filesystems internals
31 * Difficulty: Moderate
32 * Contact point: Samuel J. Greear <sjg@thesjg.com>
36 ##### HAMMER Data dedup
37 * Add a data de-duplication mechanism to HAMMER.
39 * Potential data matches using CRCs during pruning runs,
40 verify duplicate data, collapse the B-Tree reference,
41 and account for the additional ref in the allocator.
45 * Prerequisites: C, modern filesystem internals
46 * Difficulty: Moderate
47 * Contact point: dillon
51 ##### Implement i386 32-bit ABI for x86_64 64-bit kernel
52 * Add a 32-bit syscall table which translates 32-bit
53 system calls to 64-bit
55 * Add support for 32 bit compatibility mode operation
56 and ELF binary detection.
61 * Difficulty: Moderate
62 * Contact point: dillon
66 ##### Implement ARC algorithm for vnode free list
67 * Vnode recycling is LRU and can't efficiently handle data sets which
68 exceed the maxvnode limit.
72 * Prerequisites: C, OS internals
74 * Contact point: dillon
78 ##### Implement swapoff
79 * We have swapon to add swap space, we need a swapoff to
84 * Prerequisites: C, elementary OS memory management
86 * Contact point: dillon
90 ##### Graphics Kernel Memory Manager Support ( GEM )
91 * Support dealing with graphics NUMA in kernel space for modern graphics hardware
92 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Execution_Manager
96 * Prerequisites: C, knowledge of modern computer graphics system architecture
97 * Difficulty: Moderate
98 * Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org
102 ##### Make DragonFly NUMA-aware
104 * Parse related ACPI tables
105 * NUMA-aware memory allocation
107 [ACPI SLIT parser](http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2009/11/23/msg006518.html)
108 [ACPI SRAT parser](http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2009/11/23/msg006517.html)
109 [NetBSD NUMA diff](http://www.netbsd.org/~cegger/numa2.diff)
110 [NetBSD NUMA x86 diff](http://www.netbsd.org/~cegger/numa_x86.diff)
114 * Prerequisites: C, introductory computer architecture
116 * Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org
120 ##### Volume Management based on NetBSD's port of LVM2
122 NetBSD reimplemented Linux's device mapper (currently only implementing
123 the linear, zero and error targets; Linux has support for a variety of
124 targets, including crypt, stripe, snap, multipath) as dm(4). Device mapper
125 provides the functionality on which to implement volume management; NetBSD
126 has imported LVM2 (which is GPL), but it is possible to create different
127 tools for volume management (e.g. IBM's EVMS was also built on top of device
130 The goal of this project is to port both the kernel code, dm(4), and the
131 LVM2 userspace libraries and tools from NetBSD. If time remains, the
132 student should also implement a proof of concept "stripe" target or, for the
133 more ambitious, a "crypt" target.
135 A possible roadmap for this project would be
137 1. Port the dm(4) code
139 This code uses proplib instead of binary ioctls for communicating with
140 userspace. Either port proplib, or convert the code to use ioctls.
142 1. Port the userspace tools
144 Integrate the tools in our source tree using a separate vendor branch, as
145 is normally done for contrib software (see development(7)). Make any
146 DragonFlyBSD-specific changes necessary.
148 1. (Optional) Implement either a "stripe" target or a crypt target.
150 The stripe target must be designed with robustness and extensibility in
151 mind, though it is not required to go all the way. It should be flexible
152 enough to allow for different RAID level implementations (at least 0, 1
153 and 5). Additionally, it should be possible to keep an internal (i.e. part
154 of the volume) log to speed up resyncing and parity checking. Implementing
155 those features would be ideal, but is not required.
157 The crypt target must allow for different ciphers and cipher parameters and
158 should make use of our in-kernel crypto infrastructure. It is probably
159 necessary to do the encryption asynchronously which will require extending
160 the current infrastructure.
164 * Prerequisites: C, elementary OS internals
166 * Contact point: Aggelos Economopoulos <aoiko@cc.ece.ntua.gr>
170 ##### Port DragonFly to Xen platform
174 * Prerequisites: C, x86 assembly
176 * Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org
180 ##### Port valgrind to DragonFlyBSD
182 Valgrind is a very useful tool on a system like DragonFly that's under heavy development. Since valgrind is very target specific, a student doing the port will have to get acquainted with many low level details of the system libraries and the user<->kernel interface (system calls, signal delivery, threading...). This is a project that should appeal to aspiring systems programmers. Ideally, we would want the port to be usable with vkernel processes, thus enabling complex checking of the core kernel code.
184 The goal of this project is to port valgrind to the DragonFlyBSD platform so that at least the memcheck tool runs sufficiently well to be useful. This is in itself a challenging task. If time remains, the student should try to get at least a trivial valgrind tool to work on a vkernel process.
188 * Prerequisites: C, x86 assembly, low-level OS internals
190 * Contact point: Aggelos Economopoulos <aoiko@cc.ece.ntua.gr>
194 ##### Adapt pkgsrc to create a package system with dependency independence.
195 * Create a set of tools that modifies how the pkgsrc packages are installed, allowing for the ability to upgrade individual packages, without stopping applications that depend on said packages from working. One method of achieving this is detailed at http://www.dragonflybsd.org/goals/#packages but other methods may be possible. PC-BSD have written a tool called PBI Builder which modifies FreeBSD ports for their dependency independence PBI system, this could be used as a starting point for the DragonFly BSD tools.
201 * Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org
205 ##### Implement virtio drivers on DragonFly to speed up DragonFly as a KVM guest
207 As virtualization is coming more and more and KVM will be a strong player in that field,
208 we want DragonFly to have top-notch support for this virtualization platform. For this
209 purpose, we'd like to have a virtio-based implementation of a paravirtualized disk and
210 network driver. [virtio](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-virtio/index.html)
211 is an abstraction to a ring buffer that is shared between the host and the guest. On top of this
212 abstraction, one can build a variety of paravirtualized devices, as specified in
213 [virtio-spec](http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/virtio-spec/virtio-spec-0.8.6.pdf).
215 The goal of this project is to create a virtio-ring implementation and then to implement drivers
216 for the network and block devices described in the specification linked to above. This is a great
217 project for a student who wants to get experience writing (real-world, high-performance) device
218 drivers without having to deal with the quirks of real hardware.
222 * Prerequisites: C, elementary OS internals
224 * Contact point: Aggelos Economopoulos <aoiko@cc.ece.ntua.gr>, kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org
228 ##### Port FUSE or PUFFS from FreeBSD/NetBSD
230 * http://www.netbsd.org/docs/puffs/
231 * This would make many userspace filesystems available to DragonFly, e.g. sshfs to mention only one.
235 * Prerequisites: C, elementary OS internals
237 * Contact point: Michael Neumann <mneumann@ntecs.de>
241 ##### Make vkernels checkpointable
244 * Teach the checkpt syscall how to checkpoint multiple vmspaces.
245 * Add code to the vkernel which gets triggered on SIGCKPT to dump/load e.g. the current state of network drivers.
246 * This would allow us to save and restore or even migrate a complete DragonFly operating system running on the vkernel platform.
247 This could be especially handy on laptops (if we'd get X11 operating in vkernels).
248 * See also: http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/CheckpointFeatures/
252 * Prerequisites: C, OS internals
254 * Contact point: Michael Neumann <mneumann@ntecs.de>
258 ##### HAMMER compression
260 * Compress blocks as they get written to disk.
261 * Only file data (rec_type == DATA) should be compressed, not meta-data.
262 * the CRC should be that of the uncompressed data.
263 * ideally you'd need to associate the uncompressed data with the buffer cache buffer somehow, so that decompression is only performed once.
264 * compression could be turned on a per-file or per-pfs basis.
265 * gzip compression would be just fine at first.
269 * Prerequisites: C, filesystem internals
271 * Contact point: Michael Neumann <mneumann@ntecs.de>
277 * Port the whole usb4bsd stuff to DragonFly, as our own usb stack is too outdated.
279 * The usb4bsd branch of hselasky (?) has several userland wrappers and quite good abstraction to simplify the porting.
281 * (is polachok doing this or not?)
285 * Prerequisites: C, OS internals
286 * Difficulty: Moderate
287 * Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org
291 ##### Userland System V Shared Memory / Semaphore / Message Queue implementation
292 * Implement some or all of these subsystems in their entirety, or as completely as possible in userland using a daemon, mmap and the DragonFly umtx_sleep(2)/umtx_wakeup(2) or other userland facilities.
293 * Any security or other major hurdles to this approach that would likely have to be implemented in-kernel should be noted in the students application.
294 * Test and benchmark the new facilities with heavy SysV consumers such as PostgreSQL
295 * Identify performance tradeoffs made in the userland implementation versus the existing kernel implementation. If time permits identify and apply solutions to these tradeoffs so that the userland implementation performs on par with or better than the kernel implementation.
299 * Prerequisites: C, x86 assembly
300 * Difficulty: Moderate
301 * Contact point: Samuel J. Greear <sjg@thesjg.com>
306 ##### Update our interrupt routing and PCI code
307 * Update our interrupt routing to MSI (Message Signalled Interrupts)
308 * Update the PCI code to take advantage of MSI and also of newer power-saving features (see FreeBSD's work in this area)
312 * Prerequisites: C, OS internals
314 * Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org
318 ##### Proportional RSS
320 The Resident Stack Size displayed by top keeps track of the number of resident pages in
321 a certain process's adress space. It is very useful to locate memory hogs, but doesn't take
322 into account page sharing. For example, if N processes map library L and L's resident pages
323 are 1G, this 1G is added to the RSS of all N processes. A more useful number would be the
324 Proportional (or Effective) RSS, for which we divide the number of mapped shared pages by
325 the number of processes sharing each page. So in the previous example we would add 1GB/N
326 to each process that has L mapped.
328 The goal of this project is to hack the kernel to allow for effective calculation of the
329 Proportional RSS and modify top to use it in addition to the RSS (i.e. it should display it by
330 default and be able to sort based on it).
334 * Prerequisites: C, Elementary OS internals
336 * Contact point: Aggelos Economopoulos <aoiko@cc.ece.ntua.gr>