On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 4:37 AM, Arjun S R <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi, > I am graduate student interested in computer science especially in system > programming. I went through the GSoC project list and I am interested in > working on > the following projects. > > 1) Userland System V Shared Memory / Semaphore / Message Queue > implementation > 2) VFS Quota system > > How can i proceed? > Is there any qualification task? > > -- > failthfully > Arjun S R > > Arjun, I submitted multiple student proposals for the 2010 GSoC, the VFS Quota proposal I submitted was not selected. Looking back on it now, it is a bit sparse/light and could have used more detail and a more specific timeline -- as long as you communicate well with your mentor they should allow timeline alterations as needed, but that said, don't be overly optimistic. Here is my 2010 proposal, w/ some extra notes, this should contain most of the information you need to figure out what this project would involve: https://gist.github.com/846391 There are no qualification tasks, but the more well researched your proposal is the better chance you have of it being selected. Either of these projects will require excellent working knowledge of C, and some concept of the userland/kernel interface and unix development methodologies. Apart from that, you should be able to pick up the rest of what you need as you go along. As for the SysV project, the way I would proceed would be to thoroughly research the API's in question and break the potential implementation into 4 parts, what can be shared between them (they all use some sort of alphanumeric namespace, for example), shared memory, semaphores and message queues. Approach each of these as a sub-project and prioritize them, there may not be time within the constraints of GSoC to complete the implementation of all 3. The project would vastly prefer a complete, working, clean, well tested and committable implementation of shared memory or semaphores than a marginally working implementation of 2 or all 3. As part of this research work you will also need to determine whether any additional kernel support will be necessary and what that will look like, for example you might need some kernel help in the area of security. (It is certainly possible that the entire thing can be fully implemented in userland without any additional kernel support, but you will have to determine that). I would look at using a daemon to manage the namespaces and security, etc. -- You should also plan to extensively test your work with real world complex software (like postgresql) and show rough benchmarks that speak to the performance viability. So to answer your question on how to proceed (this applies to all GSoC students, not just you), pick a task or tasks, research them extensively and be prepared to write a well informed proposal when GSoC 2011 enters that phase. A thoroughly researched proposal has a high probability of being chosen. Whether DragonFly is accepted as part of GSoC 2011 or not, either of these projects are applicable to NetBSD or FreeBSD as well. Hope that helps, Sam
