# DragonFly Projects 

This page shall serve as a common place to look if you're in search of a DragonFly related project. It's also the place to check if someone else is already working on it (to prevent project collision) or should be contacted.

[[!toc levels=3 ]]

## Website projects 

### One-liners
* Add traffic report, especially to lists requests that cause 404s
* Add the mail archive to the search index
* Download link right on the main page.
* Fix [[RecentChanges]] page to have correct links back to git repo
* Fix RSS feed to have correct links
* Create layout for http://bugs.dragonflybsd.org that matches the main site.
* Create short list of tasks for a new DragonFly user 
* how to upgrade the operating system
* how to get to a working desktop
* and where and how to report issues.

### Post papers in the proper locations on the website
* Format conversion may be necessary
* Aggelos's papers from [http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~aggelos/] (http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~aggelos/) (netmp-paper.pdf and netmp.pdf) to Presentations
* ["A Peek at the vKernel" article](http://cvsweb.dragonflybsd.org/cvsweb/site/data/docs/articles/vkernel/vkernel.shtml?rev=1.3&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup) from old site

## Documentation projects 

### One-liners
* Reorder `/usr/src/UPDATING` to put more relevant information at top; remove data no longer relevant.
* Help out in [http://bugs.dragonflybsd.org](http://bugs.dragonflybsd.org) (try to reproduce, diagnose, propose fixes ...)
* Organize, contribute to, and finish the C book project.

### Handbook maintenance
* Check if the content applies to DragonFly.  If not, change it.
* Add new content and enhance the previous chapters
* Check for syntax error, typos and wiki errors.
* Add prev/next buttons to all pages.

## Userland projects 

### One-liners
* Update the [[contributed software|docs/user/ContribSoftware]] which is out-of-date.
* Remove `NOINET6` build option
* `WARN` corrections to utilities
* Bring in code from other *BSDs:
* smbfs changes from FreeBSD
* Add extended slice support to `fdisk`
* Install Coverity and fix the FreeBSD bugs that were uncovered by Coverity, but do not just blindly pull over the FreeBSD patches. Make sure that you first understand what the patch does.
* C99 Standards Conformance. The todo list is on [[/docs/developer/StandardsConformanceProject]]
* Setup a regression testing machine/system to register and find problems and new improvements..
* Networking performance / scalability
* [[RegressionTest|/docs/developer/RegressionTest]]
* also check [[HowToStressTest|/docs/developer/HowToStressTest]]
* Add lwp support to ptrace/gdb/core dumps.
* [[/docs/developer/CheckpointFeatures]]
* Linuxulator update (FreeBSD did a lot of work in this area.  Look [here](http://wiki.freebsd.org/linux-kernel),
* Bringing in version 2.0 of the BSD Installer
* UTF8 support in the console

### Scalability (algorithmic performance)
* [http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/](http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/)
* [http://bulk.fefe.de/lk2006/talk.pdf](http://bulk.fefe.de/lk2006/talk.pdf)

### Clean our code to make it [style(9)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command#style&sectionANY) compatible.
* Compile and test your changes.
* Verify that the checksum (sha(1)) of the unmodified object matches the checksum of the cleaned object.  Check also with strip(1)+sha(1)

### Port BSD-licensed tools (ex: `grep`, `diff` and `sort`)
* The OpenBSD guys already did some work related to that.
* If you manage to bring the tools to DragonFly, check if everything works as expected (e.g. rc.d scripts, make world runs, ...).
* The new tools need to have at least all the features of the old GNU tools.

### Randomize mmap() offsets
* [http://www.openbsd.org/papers/ven05-deraadt/index.html](http://www.openbsd.org/papers/ven05-deraadt/index.html)

### GDB
* ptrace/gdb follow-fork-mode support and more (peek at linux)
* Change the build to create one libbfd for gdb and binutils
* Separate RPC code from NFS into separate library.

### I/O diagnostic utilities
* A utility similar to top which displays I/O usage on a per-process basis
* Network, Disk

### SMART capabilities
* Add to natacontrol (see NetBSD's atactl?)
* Add to camcontrol

### Disk scheduling rc scripts
* Create a rc script to manage the disk/io scheduling system
* Perhaps 1 entry to "enable" it, and all disks will have mode set to "auto", in auto mode smart inquiries and other heuristics could attempt to determine the best i/o scheduler
* Per-device and device class or similar defaults should be definable in rc.conf also
* The bulk of this functionality could be implemented in a resurrected "dschedctl" utility and exposed through the rc interface using just a thin wrapper, allowing hotplug scripts and etc. an easier option to use the same facilities.

## Kernel projects 

### One-liners
* Port the BSDL OSS code to DragonFly
* Complete Path MTU Discovery by adding a host route to remember the Path MTU and setting a timer to expire old host routes. See netinet/if_ether.c for an example of this mechanism as used by ARP. Periodically increase MTU of hosts that have had its MTU decreased.
* Look for places in the kernel that can benefit from Solaris-style caching of preconstructed slab allocator objects. If we can find enough of these uses, we can add this functionality to the kernel memory allocator.
* Implement [`sem_open()`](http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/functions/sem_open.html), [`sem_close()`](http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/functions/sem_close.html), and [`sem_unlink()`](http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/functions/sem_unlink.html).
* Clean our code to make it [style(9)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command#style&sectionANY) compatible.  Compile and test your changes.  Verify that the checksum (sha(1)) of the unmodified object matches the checksum of the cleaned object.  Check also with strip(1)+sha(1)
* Setup a regression testing machine/system to register and find problems and new improvements..
* Networking performance scalability
* fix `APIC_IO` on SMP
* Port or update drivers from other systems.
* Port NFSv4.  [This mail](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2008-01/msg00065.html) is a good starting point.
* clean up buildworld/kernel compilation warnings
* Port DragonFly over to Xen.
* Port DTrace
* Capriccio threads

### Code to port/sync from FreeBSD
* PCI code (to take advantage of power saving features)
* Bring in support for UFS2, just the changes to extend the width of some fields from 32 bits to 64 bits.
* hardware drivers.

### Code to port/sync from OpenBSD
* Add support for the NoExecute bit as described in [http://www.openbsd.org/papers/auug04/index.html](http://www.openbsd.org/papers/auug04/index.html).
* After that, make user stacks and data heaps non-executable. (W^X)
* hardware drivers, specially wireless.

### CPU scheduler
* A scheduler API supporting multiple scheduler implementations already exists
* Add a Solaris-like dispatcher framework that can handle more than one installed scheduling policy

### I/O scheduler
* A pluggable kernel I/O scheduler already exists
* Implement additional disk scheduling policies

### Modify firmware framework
* We currently use the firmware(9) FreeBSD also uses
* It would be more appropriate to avoid future problems with redistribution problems, etc, to adapt the wifi firmware stuff to use the firmware(9) we used to have before, which was able to load firmware files from userland (/etc/firmware).
* See "firmware discussion" thread on kernel@ mailing list, March-May 2010.
* Since it's not desired to just add another way of doing it, this project should include getting rid of loading firmwares as modules

### Work relating to LWKT (LightWeightKernelThreading)
* Implement lazy IPI cross-processor lwkt message passing.
* Add timeout functionality to lwkt_waitmsg().
* Write man pages for the lwkt message passing API.

### Filesystem extended attributes
* Generic VFS attributes layer
* Emulate attributes ala Darwin
* Allow filesystems to define their own attribute vop ops
* QUESTIONS: Attributes or subfiles? The consensus is that subfiles are better?

### Hardware virtualization extensions
* Increase performance of virtual kernels
* Make use of hardware virtualization extensions, if supported, to manage vmspaces
* Make use of hardware IOMMU support if available

### Remove zalloc
* zalloc is a deprecated kernel interface and all current consumers can be ported to objcache, with varying levels of difficulty.
* Easier: kqueue, nfs nodes, ufs dirhash, aio, crypto, vm_map_entry
* Harder: zlib, pv entries
* Once all consumers are ported, zalloc can be removed.


For more theoretical projects and project concepts see [[ResearchProjects|/docs/developer/ResearchProjectsPage]]