X-Git-Url: https://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/ikiwiki.git/blobdiff_plain/47a3f168eabfda8f12fda8d6552b9641c4c9cca6..HEAD:/docs/developer/gsocprojectspage/index.mdwn diff --git a/docs/developer/gsocprojectspage/index.mdwn b/docs/developer/gsocprojectspage/index.mdwn index 396c282e..0ad65ba5 100644 --- a/docs/developer/gsocprojectspage/index.mdwn +++ b/docs/developer/gsocprojectspage/index.mdwn @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ [[!toc levels=0]] -Have a look at our SoC pages from [[2008|/docs/developer/GoogleSoC2008/]], [[2009|/docs/developer/gsoc2009/]], [[2010|/docs/developer/gsoc2010/]] and [[2011|/docs/developer/gsoc2011/]] to get an overview about prior year's projects. +Have a look at our SoC pages from [[2008|/docs/developer/GoogleSoC2008/]], [[2009|/docs/developer/gsoc2009/]], [[2010|/docs/developer/gsoc2010/]], [[2011|/docs/developer/gsoc2011/]], and [[2012|/docs/developer/gsoc2012/]], to get an overview about prior year's projects. For more details on Google's Summer of Code: [Google's SoC page](http://socghop.appspot.com/) @@ -22,49 +22,92 @@ Legend: --- -##### Implement i386 32-bit ABI for x86_64 64-bit kernel -* Add a 32-bit syscall table which translates 32-bit - system calls to 64-bit. -* Add support for 32 bit compatibility mode operation - and ELF binary detection. +##### Port pf firewall changes from FreeBSD -The idea here is to support the execution of 32 bit DragonFly binaries in 64 bit DragonFly environments, something numerous other operating systems have done. Several things must be done to support this. First, the appropriate control bits must be set to execute in 32-bit compatibility mode while in usermode instead of 64-bit mode. Second, when a system call is made from 32-bit mode a translation layer is needed to translate the system call into the 64-bit requivalent within the kernel. Third, the signal handler and trampoline code needs to operate on the 32-bit signal frame. Fourth, the 32 and 64 bit ELF loaders both have to be in the kernel at the same time, which may require some messing around with procedure names and include files since originally the source was designed to be one or the other. +DragonFly's version of the pf firewall was brought in from OpenBSD 4.7. FreeBSD imported the pf from OpenBSD 4.8 and has significantly enhanced the SMP performance of the firewall. Port the FreeBSD version of pf. -There are several hundred system calls which translates to a great deal of 'grunt work' when it comes time to actually do all the translations. +Meta information: + +* Prerequisites: C, network programing +* Difficulty: Moderate +* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org, #dragonfly irc channel + +--- + +##### Implement GEM for the DragonFly kernel + +The Graphics Execution Manager is a memory management system dedicated +to Intel graphics chipsets. Along with KMS, it is a requirement of +2010 and more recent Intel Xorg drivers. + +The dports third-party application collection already contains all the userland bits needed to use the new drivers, provided WITH_NEW_XORG and WITH_KMS options are used in make.conf + +Background GEM information: + +* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Execution_Manager +* http://lwn.net/Articles/283798/ +* http://blog.ffwll.ch/2012/10/i915gem-crashcourse.html + +Some kernel work has already been done in this domain by FreeBSD and could probably be adapted: + +* https://wiki.freebsd.org/Intel_GPU + +Related work has also been done previously by David Shao during a 2010 GSoC project: + +* http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/GEMdrmKMS/ +* https://github.com/davshao/dflygsocdrm + +The dflygsocdrm branch is kept up-to-date but sadly seems to only be working on i386 DragonFly systems, and with ~2010 era Intel chipsets. + +An experimental port of the FreeBSD i915/kms code is also available, albeit non-working due to the missing GEM support. + +Adding PAT (Page Attribute Table) support to the kernel seems to be a required first step: + +* http://lwn.net/Articles/278994/ Meta information: -* Prerequisites: C -* Difficulty: Difficult (lots of moving parts, particularly the trapframes) -* Contact point: dillon +* Prerequisites: C, x86 architecture and paging knowledge +* Difficulty: Moderate to difficult +* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org, #dragonfly irc channel --- -##### Implement ARC algorithm extension for the vnode free list -* Vnode recycling is LRU and can't efficiently handle data sets which - exceed the maxvnode limit. When the maxvnode limit is reached the kernel - starts throwing away cached vnodes along with their VM objects (and thus - all related cached file data). +##### Implement Linux compatibility for the x86_64 DragonFly kernel +* Add a syscall table which translates Linux system calls to DragonFly ones +* Add support for ELF binary detection. -* What we would like to do is implement an ARC algorithm for the free - vnodes to determine which ones to throw away and potentially combine - this with further caching of the related VM object even after the vnode - is thrown away by associating it with a mount point and inode number, - until memory pressure forces all of its pages out. +DragonFly/i386 supports the execution of 32 bit Linux binaries; it +is only natural to implement the same kind of binary compatibility +for 64-bit systems. -* For this project the student can choose to just implement the VM object - retention portion and not try to implement an ARC algorithm (which can - be considerably more complex). +Some of the other *BSD systems may already have implemented such a mechanism. Meta information: -* Prerequisites: C, OS internals -* Difficulty: Modest without ARC (Very difficult with ARC) -* Contact point: dillon +* Prerequisites: C, i386 and amd64 architecture knowledge +* Difficulty: Moderate to difficult +* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org + +--- + +##### Sync DragonFly jail capability with FreeBSD jail capability +* Implement sysctl -d security.jail.{param}> (see FreeBSD man 8 jail) +* port libjail (jail(), jail_get(), jail_set(), jail_remove(), jail_attach() functions) and incorporate into base +* remove jail(), jail_attach() functions from libC +* update existing system jail tools: jail, jls, jexec to match FreeBSD functionality and to use libjail + +The DragonFly jails were updated from FreeBSD-4.8 capability to FreeBSD 5.1 capability in 2005. They haven't been improved on since. This goal of this project is to make DragonFly jails to be functionally identical to FreeBSD 9.x jail functionality such that software designed to work using modern FreeBSD jail functions will work on DragonFly without modification. + +Meta information: + +* Prerequisites: C, OS Internals +* Difficulty: Moderate to difficult +* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org --- -##### Make DragonFly NUMA-aware +##### Make allocation in the DragonFly kernel NUMA-aware * Parse related ACPI tables * NUMA-aware memory allocation @@ -74,15 +117,16 @@ Meta information: [NetBSD NUMA diff](http://www.netbsd.org/~cegger/numa2.diff) [NetBSD NUMA x86 diff](http://www.netbsd.org/~cegger/numa_x86.diff) (These patches now in NetBSD tree) +* This is a huge project, the initial GSoC portion of this project should focus only on creating infrastructure and proving out that infrastructure. The initial work should attempt to not create or enforce any specific allocation _policies_ based on the available NUMA information, simply provide that information in an easy to access and use fashion and create the possibility at various levels of implementing a future allocation policy. This could be initially proven out with simple dummy policies. + Meta information: * Prerequisites: C, introductory computer architecture -* Difficulty: Easy +* Difficulty: Easy-Hard * Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org --- - ##### Port valgrind to DragonFlyBSD 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. @@ -97,41 +141,7 @@ Meta information: --- -##### Adapt pkgsrc to create a package system with dependency independence. -* 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. - -Meta information: - -* Prerequisites: C -* Difficulty: ? -* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org - ---- - -##### Implement virtio drivers on DragonFly to speed up DragonFly as a KVM guest (2011 Project) - -As virtualization is coming more and more and KVM will be a strong player in that field, -we want DragonFly to have top-notch support for this virtualization platform. For this -purpose, we'd like to have a virtio-based implementation of a paravirtualized disk and -network driver. [virtio](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-virtio/index.html) -is an abstraction to a ring buffer that is shared between the host and the guest. On top of this -abstraction, one can build a variety of paravirtualized devices, as specified in -[virtio-spec](http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/virtio-spec/virtio-spec-0.8.6.pdf). - -The goal of this project is to create a virtio-ring implementation and then to implement drivers -for the network and block devices described in the specification linked to above. This is a great -project for a student who wants to get experience writing (real-world, high-performance) device -drivers without having to deal with the quirks of real hardware. - -Meta information: - -* Prerequisites: C, elementary OS internals -* Difficulty: Medium -* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org - ---- - -##### Make vkernels checkpointable (2011 Project) +##### Make vkernels checkpointable * See checkpt(1). * Implement save and restore of segment registers so that threaded applications may be checkpointed. The segment registers support TLS. There are potential security concerns here. @@ -140,6 +150,7 @@ Meta information: * This would allow us to save and restore or even migrate a complete DragonFly operating system running on the vkernel platform. This could be especially handy on laptops (if we'd get X11 operating in vkernels). * See also: http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/CheckpointFeatures/ +* A student made good progress on this in 2011, a future student could use her work as a foundation to stand on to complete the project: https://github.com/iriina/DragonFlyBSD/tree/test2.10.1 Meta information: @@ -188,31 +199,6 @@ Meta information: --- -##### DragonFly history access for Gnome/KDE -* Write a Dolphin (KDE) plugin or Gnome file manager plugin that creates a 'time slider' when working with HAMMER filesystems. -* If time remains investigate additional features and/or methods of display and possibly a HAMMER configuration utility for managing history retention, etc. - -Meta information: - -* Prerequisites: C, Gnome or KDE familiarity -* Difficulty: Hard -* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org -* References: [A similar idea for ZFS](http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs) - ---- - -##### Create a Samba VFS plugin to expose Hammer history -* Give access to Hammer snapshots/fine-grained history to anyone able to access the Hammer volume over Samba -* This would involve writing a Samba3 VFS module to expose historical versions of files as "shadow copies". VFS module implementations supporting more traditional snapshot hierarchies do already exist. - -Meta information: - -* Prerequisites: C -* Difficulty: Moderate -* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org - ---- - ##### Port Hyper-V Linux Integration components to DragonFly * Microsoft released a dual BSD/GPL version of their para-virtualized drivers (SCSI and Networking) for Linux. * This work would require porting the Linux VMBus (Microsoft's equivlalent to XenBus) and the corresponding SCSI (StorVSC) and networking (NetVSC) drivers to DragonFly. @@ -307,16 +293,6 @@ Meta information: --- -#####Ability to execute Mach-O (OS X) binaries -This is a project for a student with something to prove, executing a binary touches a huge number of moving parts of a modern kernel. This project would entail adding or porting support for Mach-O binaries to the DragonFly BSD kernel. It would also involve adding an additional system call vector, like the Linux vector used for linux binary emulation. This is quite a large and complicated task and any proposal will be expected to be well-researched to reflect that. The ability to execute non-GUI binaries that make use of shared libraries should be the minimum to which such a project should aspire. OpenDarwin is available as a reference or to port relevant code from. - -Meta information: - -* Prerequisites: C, OS internals, binary file formats -* Difficulty: Hard -* Contact point: Samuel J. Greear - ---- ##### nmalloc (libc malloc) measurements and performance work nmalloc is our libc memory allocator it is a slab-like allocator; it recently had some work done to add per-thread caches, but there is much more work that could be done. A project on this might characterize fragmentation, try out a number of techniques to improve per-thread caching and reduce the number of total syscalls, and see if any are worth applying. @@ -372,91 +348,267 @@ This thesis is an excellent overview of many techniques to reduce contention and --- -##### Create a filesystem indexing service -Currently to locate an arbitrary file on a dragonfly system you would use the locate(1), which(1) or whereis(1) tools. These are a bit clunky, paint in broad strokes and the accuracy of the database is often suspect. The first part of this project would involve implementing the Linux inotify interface in the DragonFly kernel. The second part would be to write a daemon that can (optionally) operate as an indexing service, if the weekly 310.locate periodic job see's that the locate database is being maintained by the daemon, it can skip running locate.updatedb(8). A third part of this project might involve extending the current database to a binary format with information about file types, what bits are set, etc. This could enable the user to have the locate tool paint in narrower strokes by specifying only files of type "ASCII text" or only files that are suid root or have the execute bit set. +##### Make DragonFly multiboot capable +Adjust the DragonFly kernel to be multiboot (the specification) capable. In addition, add necessary code to grub2 to understand our disklabel64 and anything else we need to be able to use grub2 to multiboot DragonFly without any chainloading involved. Meta information: -* Prerequisites: C, OS internals, binary file formats +* Prerequisites: C, OS internals * Difficulty: Easy/Moderate -* Contact point: Samuel J. Greear +* Contact point: Alex Hornung --- -##### Make DragonFly multiboot capable -Adjust the DragonFly kernel to be multiboot (the specification) capable. In addition, add necessary code to grub2 to understand our disklabel64 and anything else we need to be able to use grub2 to multiboot DragonFly without any chainloading involved. +##### Extend dsched framework to support jails +Extend/modify the dsched framework to take into account jails and etc. instead of always allocating a 'tdio'. This would allow different process groupings (such as all processes in a jail) to be scheduled together. A new jail-specific policy would have to be written to support this, or an existing policy modified. Meta information: * Prerequisites: C, OS internals -* Difficulty: Easy/Moderate -* Contact point: Alex Hornung - +* Difficulty: Moderate +* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org, Samuel J. Greear , Alex Hornung --- -##### Add SMT/HT awareness to our scheduler -Our scheduler (sys/kern/usched_bsd4.c) doesn't know about Simultaneous multithreading/HyperThreads. -The aim of this project is to add awareness of SMT to it so that scheduling on multithreaded CPUs improves. This involves among other things to first schedule on actual physical cores before populating the hyperthreads. The ground work of adding a generic way of detecting how many threads each core has, etc, also has to be done as part of this project. +##### Implement i386 32-bit ABI for x86_64 64-bit kernel +* Add a 32-bit syscall table which translates 32-bit + system calls to 64-bit. +* Add support for 32 bit compatibility mode operation + and ELF binary detection. + +The idea here is to support the execution of 32 bit DragonFly binaries in 64 bit DragonFly environments, something numerous other operating systems have done. Several things must be done to support this. First, the appropriate control bits must be set to execute in 32-bit compatibility mode while in usermode instead of 64-bit mode. Second, when a system call is made from 32-bit mode a translation layer is needed to translate the system call into the 64-bit requivalent within the kernel. Third, the signal handler and trampoline code needs to operate on the 32-bit signal frame. Fourth, the 32 and 64 bit ELF loaders both have to be in the kernel at the same time, which may require some messing around with procedure names and include files since originally the source was designed to be one or the other. + +There are several hundred system calls which translates to a great deal of 'grunt work' when it comes time to actually do all the translations. -See http://lwn.net/Articles/8553/ for what Linux has done in this area. +In 2012 a GSoC made reasonable progress on this project, a future GSoC student could pick up where he left off: http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/~ivan/dragonfly.git/shortlog/refs/heads/32bit_api_dirty_2 Meta information: -* Prerequisites: C, OS internals, process scheduling -* Difficulty: Moderate -* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org, Alex Hornung +* Prerequisites: C +* Difficulty: Difficult (lots of moving parts, particularly the trapframes) +* Contact point: dillon + +--- +##### Adapt pkgsrc to create a package system with dependency independence. +* Create a set of tools (even better if it can be used like a library) 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. Any attempt at this should leave room in the implementation to potentially work with other build systems, such as dports. +Meta information: +* Prerequisites: C +* Difficulty: ? +* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org --- -##### Complete installer rewrite -Completely rewrite the installer to be much simpler to maintain. It will still have to be an ncurses-based installer written in C, or in Python (but with C bindings for every single library that will be created - see below). A text interface UI library (e.g. newt [see examples on http://gnewt.sourceforge.net/tutorial-4.html] - which seems very easy and handy) should be used to make the handling of the graphical part as easy as possible. +##### Ability to execute Mach-O (OS X) binaries +This is a project for a student with something to prove, executing a binary touches a huge number of moving parts of a modern kernel. This project would entail adding or porting support for Mach-O binaries to the DragonFly BSD kernel. It would also involve adding an additional system call vector, like the Linux vector used for linux binary emulation. This is quite a large and complicated task and any proposal will be expected to be well-researched to reflect that. The ability to execute non-GUI binaries that make use of shared libraries should be the minimum to which such a project should aspire. OpenDarwin is available as a reference or to port relevant code from. + +Meta information: + +* Prerequisites: C, OS internals, binary file formats +* Difficulty: Hard +* Contact point: Samuel J. Greear -As part of rewriting the installer, several functions scattered around in other base utils should be factored out into libraries that both the installer and the util it comes from can use, e.g.: +--- + +##### Installer rework +Upgrade/partially rewrite the installer to be much simpler to maintain. As part of reworking the installer, several functions scattered around in other base utils should be factored out into libraries that both the installer and the util it comes from can use, e.g.: * partitioning (both GPT and MBR) should be factored out into two libraries, that the fdisk and the gpt tools use, but the installer can make use of, too. * disklabel32/64 functionality * adduser (and other user/group management) -The new installer should then make use of all these new libraries and other ones that are already available (libcryptsetup, libluks, liblvm, libtcplay) to offer more advanced features. +The updated installer should then make use of all these new libraries and other ones that are already available (libcryptsetup, libluks, liblvm, libtcplay) to offer more advanced features. + + +Meta information: + +* Prerequisites: C +* Difficulty: Moderate +* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org + + +--- -NOTE: The new installer should maintain most if not all of the functionality of the old installer in addition to adding features taking advantage of the aforementioned libraries. +##### Kernel - Add support for more CPUs +DragonFly is currently limited to 63 CPU cores. Servers with more core than that are becoming sort of available or even potentially affordable. Supporting a number of cores greater than 63 is the first step in really testing SMP. +See this post for details: + +[http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/kernel/2014-February/063062.html](http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/kernel/2014-February/063062.html) Meta information: * Prerequisites: C * Difficulty: Moderate -* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org, Alex Hornung +* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org, Matthew Dillon + +--- +##### HAMMER2 - Add block encryption feature +Add physical block encryption to HAMMER2. + +* Add a hammer2 utility command and associated ioctl to set the encryption mode on a directory, to be inherited by any new files or subdirectories created therein. + +* Implement one encryption method. Encryption meta-data space is available in the blockref, usually around 192 bits, which can be used to specify e.g. a public key, salt, IV, and/or encryption chaining through the filesystem topology. Actual physical blocks must be encrypted in-place (1:1). + +Meta information: + +* Prerequisites: C +* Difficulty: Moderate +* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org, Matthew Dillon --- -##### Extend dsched framework to support jails -Extend/modify the dsched framework to take into account jails and etc. instead of always allocating a 'tdio'. This would allow different process groupings (such as all processes in a jail) to be scheduled together. A new jail-specific policy would have to be written to support this, or an existing policy modified. + +##### HAMMER2 - Add copies feature +Add block redundancy to HAMMER2 + +* hammer2 implements a fully set-associative indirect block table with dynamic radix, which means that the entries in an indirect block table have a lot of flexibility, including the ability to have redundant entries representing the same block. + +* Implement hammer2's copies feature which allows one to configure multiple volumes and to specify that more than one copy of the filesystem topology be maintained. This requires both a realtime piece to handle filesystem modifications in progress, and a batch piece to tie-up loose ends. for a GSOC the batch piece is the easiest to implement for writing purposes, with a realtime piece for reading (but not writing, which would be much more difficult). The batch piece would simply traverse the filesystem looking for missing copies and construct the missing copies in batch or semi-real-time. + +* Such an implementation would allow HAMMER2 to operate with redundant hard drives and for hard drives to be ejected and added (within reason) on a live system. Meta information: -* Prerequisites: C, OS internals +* Prerequisites: C, heavy kernel knowledge +* Difficulty: Hard +* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org, Matthew Dillon + +--- + +##### Regression framework improvements +DragonFly has a simple regression testing framework, dfregress(8) and tbridge(9), that supports testing both userland and kernel modules. +Potential work to be done: + +* Separate out the test runner from the results collector/aggregator/controller so that you can run the test runner on a VM or vkernel, and collect the results on a different system. That way, if the system under test crashes, the tests can continue. +* Create necessary infrastructure, including provisioning, to be able to spin up VMs with DragonFly for testing, especially kernel testing. A first step would be to get this to work with spinning up vkernels. +* Add support for per-testcase manifests instead of having to put everything in the runlist +* Allow testcases to specify a list of artifacts that should be kept +* Integrate all tests we have into dfregress +* Add an html output generator like dfr2text. I have a started one laying around somewhere. +* Add more tests + +Meta information: + +* Prerequisites: C and a scripting language such as Python or Ruby * Difficulty: Moderate -* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org, Samuel J. Greear , Alex Hornung +* Contact point: Alex Hornung , kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org + --- -##### Implement NFS version 4 -* NFSv4 is more than a simple version increase; it is an adaptation of NFS to Internet and WAN networks, with an expectation of high latency and firewalled data transfers and a non-naive security framework layer. -* NFSv4 servers export a single Pseudo File System (which has nothing to do with HAMMER(5) PFSes besides the name) merging all local filesystems in a unique namespace. -* We already have some kernel code which could be used as a starting point (WebNFS) -* FreeBSD possesses a NFSv4 implementation which could be ported or serve as a reference basis -* Given NFSv4 protocol complexity, it may be best to implement this project in userspace + +##### Port bhyve - The BSD Hypervisor +DragonFly has no efficient solution for running other operating systems as guests. +[Bhyve](http://bhyve.org/) is virtual machine manager for FreeBSD similar to the Linux KVM. This would be a big step forward for DragonFlyBSD, as it would allow us to run DragonFly on native hardware in situations where also Linux (or other operating systems) is required. IMHO, this would also reduce/eliminate the need for Linux 64-bit compatibility. Meta information: -* Prerequisites: C, OS internals, ideally some knowledge of the VFS and namecache layers +* Prerequisites: C, heavy kernel knowledge +* Difficulty: Hard +* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org + +--- + +##### Support DragonFly on bhyve - The BSD Hypervisor + +DragonFly needs a new loader to run on [Bhyve](http://bhyve.org/) + +Meta information: + +* Prerequisites: C, heavy kernel knowledge +* Difficulty: Hard +* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org + +--- + +##### Port VirtualBox +DragonFly has no efficient solution for running other operating systems as guests. VirtualBox depends on +a kernel module. Port this from FreeBSD. + +Meta information: + +* Prerequisites: C, Kernel knowledge +* Difficulty: Medium-Hard +* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org + +--- + +##### Improve DragonFly as a VirtualBox guest +When running DragonFly under VirtualBox, you don't have good support for graphics and also the clipboard is not working between host and guest. Port the virtualbox guest extensions to DragonFly. + +Meta information: + +* Prerequisites: C, Kernel knowledge +* Difficulty: Medium-Hard +* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org + +--- + +##### Support KVM +Add a KVM-compatible API to DragonFly, to be able to run qemu-kvm natively. This requires a fair bit of prior investigation as part of the proposal. + +This could be based on a port of bhyve (see the bhyve project on this page), with an added compatibility API for KVM. + +[https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt] + +Meta information: + +* Prerequisites: C, Kernel knowledge +* Difficulty: Very Hard +* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org + + +--- + + +##### Tickless Kernel +Make the DragonFly kernel tickless. + +Meta information: + +* Prerequisites: C, Kernel knowledge +* Difficulty: Medium-Hard +* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org + +--- + +##### Experiment with Rust in the kernel +[Rust](http://www.rust-lang.org) is a safetly-oriented language in the same leage as C++ but without many of it's short-comings. It doesn't depend on a GC and can be used for very low-level tasks as well as high-level code. It is heavily developed by the Mozilla foundation. + +The GSoC project would consist of being able to write a simple kernel module in Rust and access some of the kernel API (kmalloc, etc.). It also includes bootstrapping Rust to DragonFly. + +What can be accomplished with Rust in the kernel? What would be the advantages and what the disadvantages? For example how could the device hierarchy be represented in Rust? Implementing a simple device driver. How can existing APIs be represented in Rust using traits? How could C call Rust code? + +[http://blog.theincredibleholk.org/blog/2013/11/18/booting-to-rust/] + +Meta information: + +* Prerequisites: C, Rust, Kernel knowledge * Difficulty: Medium -* Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org +* Contact point: Michael Neumann , kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org + + +--- + +##### Improve Kernel boot speed +How fast can be boot? Where (in which subsystems) is most time spend. What can we do to boot faster? + +* Research source of delays in boot process, keyboard init, scsi? +* Better thread some hardware init, for example USB? +* Perhaps look to see how Linux can boot in one second, better pci scan code? +* "Some kernel work made it possible to do asynchronous initialization of some subsystems. For example, the modified kernel starts the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) initialization, to handle storage, at the same time as the Universal Host Controller Interface (UHCI), in order to handle USB" - http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ + + +Meta information: + +* Prerequisites: C, Kernel knowledge +* Difficulty: Moderate +* Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org + + --- (please add)