Google Summer of Code Project List

Have a look at our SoC pages from 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012, to get an overview about prior year's projects.

For more details on Google's Summer of Code: Google's SoC page

Alternate project links: Projects page, Research Projects

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 the proposals on this page to those that (based on our past experience) are appropriate for the GSoC program. This is by no means a comprehensive list, original ideas or proposals based on project ideas found on other pages are very welcome.

Note to everyone else: These proposals are by no means Summer of Code specific, anyone is welcome and encouraged to adopt any of these projects at any time (just please let us know, or make a note on this page).

Legend:

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.
Difficulty: Estimated difficulty of the project, taking into account the complexity of the task and the time constraints of the GSoC program.
Contact point: The person you should contact for any further information or clarifications. If the primary contact for a project does not respond in a reasonable amount of time (2-3 days), you should contact the appropriate DragonFly BSD mailing list, usually kernel@.

Project ideas

Port pf firewall changes from FreeBSD

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.

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, x86 architecture and paging knowledge
Difficulty: Moderate to difficult
Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org, #dragonfly irc channel

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.

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.

Some of the other *BSD systems may already have implemented such a mechanism.

Meta information:

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 allocation in the DragonFly kernel NUMA-aware

Parse related ACPI tables
NUMA-aware memory allocation
References: ACPI SLIT parser ACPI SRAT parser NetBSD NUMA diff NetBSD 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-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.

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.

Meta information:

Prerequisites: C, x86 assembly, low-level OS internals
Difficulty: Hard
Contact point: Aggelos Economopoulos aoiko@cc.ece.ntua.gr

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.
Teach the checkpt system call how to checkpoint multiple vmspaces.
Add code to the vkernel which gets triggered upon reception of a SIGCKPT signal to dump/load e.g. the current state of network drivers.
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:

Prerequisites: C, OS internals
Difficulty: Medium
Contact point: Michael Neumann mneumann@ntecs.de
References: 1 2

HAMMER compression

Compress blocks as they get written to disk.
Only file data (rec_type == DATA) should be compressed, not meta-data.
the CRC should be that of the uncompressed data.
ideally you'd need to associate the uncompressed data with the buffer cache buffer somehow, so that decompression is only performed once.
compression could be turned on a per-file or per-pfs basis.
gzip compression would be just fine at first.

Doing compression would require flagging the data record as being compressed and also require double-buffering since the buffer cache buffer associated with the uncompressed data might have holes in it and otherwise referenced by user programs and cannot serve as a buffer for in-place compression or decompression.

The direct read / direct write mechanic would almost certainly have to be disabled for compressed buffers and the small-data zone would probably have to be used (the large-data zone is designed only for use with 16K or 64K buffers).

Meta information:

Prerequisites: C, filesystem internals
Difficulty: Difficult
Contact point: Michael Neumann mneumann@ntecs.de

Userland System V Shared Memory / Semaphore / Message Queue implementation

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.
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.
Test and benchmark the new facilities with heavy SysV consumers such as PostgreSQL
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.

Meta information:

Prerequisites: C, x86 assembly
Difficulty: Moderate
Contact point: Samuel J. Greear sjg@thesjg.com

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.
References: Sources Architecture Overview

Meta information:

Prerequisites: C, OS internals
Difficulty: Hard
Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org

Implement more dm targets

Since we now have dm (device mapper) in DragonFly, it would be nice to make better use of it. Currently we have a relatively small number of useful targets (crypt, linear and striped).
Other targets should be implemented, in particular the mirror target would be of interest. Other ideas are welcome, too. Before applying for this please discuss the target of interest on the mailing list or with me directly.
There is a start of a journalled mirror target, if you want to attack soft mirroring; the problem is a lot more difficult than it seems at first, so talking on the mailing list or on IRC would be definitely worthwhile!

Meta information:

Prerequisites: C, OS internals
Difficulty: Medium
Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org , Alex Hornung alexh@dragonflybsd.org, Venkatesh Srinivas vsrinivas@dragonflybsd.org

Implement a new unionfs

unionfs is a particularly useful pseudo-fs which allows to have an upper and a lower filesystem on a single mountpoint. The upper mountpoint is mostly transparent, so that the lower mountpoint is accessible.
A typical use case is mounting a tmpfs filesystem as the upper and a read-only FS as the lower mp. This way files can be edited transparently even on a RO filesystem without actually modifying it.
The current unionfs is completely broken as it relies on the whiteout VFS technique which is not supported by HAMMER. A new unionfs implementation should not rely on archaic methods such as whiteout.

Meta information:

Prerequisites: C, OS internals, ideally some knowledge of the FreeBSD/DragonFly VFS
Difficulty: Medium
Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org

Improve compatibility of libdevattr with Linux' libudev

Our libdevattr has an API which is mostly compatible with Linux' libudev, but it is doubtful that any Linux application making use of libudev would run out of the box on DragonFly with libdevattr.
The aim of this project is to identify the shortcomings of libdevattr and fix them so that some common libudev applications work with our libdevattr.
This might involve some kernel hacking to improve our kern_udev and definitely includes some grunt work of "tagging" subsystems with the kern_udev API.
Most of the work will be in userland, though, working on udevd and libdevattr.

Meta information:

Prerequisites: C, familiarity with Linux' libudev would be a plus
Difficulty: Medium
Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org , Alex Hornung alexh@dragonflybsd.org

Implement further dsched disk scheduling policies (2011 Project: BFQ)

dsched is a highly flexible disk scheduling framework which greatly minimizes the effort of writing disk scheduling policies.
Currently only dsched_fq, a fairly simple fair-queuing policy, and noop policies are implemented.
The aim of this project would be to implement at least another useful disk scheduling policy, preferably one that improves interactivity.
Other ideas are welcome.
This is a great opportunity for CS students interested in scheduling problems to apply their theoretical knowledge.

Meta information:

Prerequisites: C, OS internals, familiarity with disk scheduling
Difficulty: Medium
Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org , Alex Hornung alexh@dragonflybsd.org

Implement hardware nested page table support for vkernels

Various modern hardware supports virtualization extensions, including nested pagetables.
The DragonFly BSD vmspaces API, used to support vkernels, is effectively a software implementation of nested pagetables.
The goal of this project would be to add support for detection of the hardware features on AMD and Intel cpu's and alter the vmspace implementation to use hardware support when available.

Meta information:

Prerequisites: C, x86 assembly, OS internals
Difficulty: Hard
Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org

Access to ktr(4) buffers via shared memory

Our event tracing system, ktr(4), records interesting events in per-cpu buffers that are printed out with ktrdump(8). Currently, ktrdump uses libkvm to access these buffers, which is suboptimal. One can allow a sufficiently-privileged userspace process to map those buffers read-only and access them directly. For bonus points, design an extensible, discoverable (think reflection) mechanism that provides fast access via shared memory to data structures that the kernel chooses to expose to userland.

Meta information:

Prerequisites: C, OS internals
Difficulty: Medium
Contact point: kernel@crater.dragonflybsd.org, Aggelos Economopoulos aoiko@cc.ece.ntua.gr

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.

Possible things to work on: (thread caches) * The per-thread caches are fixed-size; at larger object sizes (say 4K), this can result in a lot of memory tied up. Perhaps they should scale their max size inversely to the object size.

The per-thread caches are filled one-at-a-time from free(). Perhaps the per-thread caches should be burst-filled.
Perhaps the per-thread caches should age items out

(slab zone allocation) * zone_alloc() currently burst-allocates slab zones with the zone magazine held across a spinlock.

zone_free() holds the zone magazine lock around bzero()ing a slab zone header
zone_free() madvise()s one slab at a time; it'd be nice to madvise() runs of contiguous slabs
zone_free() madvise()s very readily (for every slab freed). Perhaps it should only madvise slabs that are idle for some time
zone_free() burst-frees slabs. Its not clear whether this is a good idea.

(VMEM): * currently allocations > either 4k or 8k are forced directly to mmap(); this means that idle memory from free slabs cannot be used to service those allocations and that we do no caching for allocations > than that size. this is almost certainly a mistake.

we could use a small (embeddable) data structure that allows:
1. efficient coalescing of adjacent mmap space for madvise
2. efficient queries for vmem_alloc() (w/ alignment!)
3. compact and doesn't use any space in the zone header (dirty/cold!)
4. allows traversal in address order to fight fragmentation
5. keep two such data structures (one for dirty pages, one for cold pages)

(Note) * These are just ideas; there are many more things possible and many of these things need a lot of measurement to evaluate them. It'd be interesting to see if any of these are appropriate for it.

References: * http://www.usenix.org/event/usenix01/bonwick.html

A description of the Sun Solaris work on which the DragonFly allocator is based; use this as an overview, but do not take it as gospel for how the DFly allocator works.

http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~vsrinivas/jemalloc-tech-talk.ogv (Jason Evans tech talk about jemalloc, 1/2011)

jemalloc is FreeBSD's and Firefox's (and NetBSD and GNASH and ...)'s malloc; in this tech talk, Jason Evans reviews how jemalloc works, how it has changed recently, and how it avoid fragmentation.

http://endeavour.zapto.org/src/malloc-thesis.pdf (Ayelet Wasik's thesis 'Features of a Multi-Threaded Memory Allocator')

This thesis is an excellent overview of many techniques to reduce contention and the effects these techniques have on fragmentation.

Prerequisites: C, a taste of data structures
Difficulty: moderate
Contact point: Venkatesh Srinivas me@endeavour.zapto.org

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
Difficulty: Easy/Moderate
Contact point: Alex Hornung alexh@dragonflybsd.org

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: Moderate
Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org, Samuel J. Greear sjg@thesjg.com, Alex Hornung alexh@dragonflybsd.org

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.

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
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

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 sjg@thesjg.com

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 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

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

Meta information:

Prerequisites: C
Difficulty: Moderate
Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org, Matthew Dillon dillon@backplane.com

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 dillon@backplane.com

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, heavy kernel knowledge
Difficulty: Hard
Contact point: kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org, Matthew Dillon dillon@backplane.com

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: Alex Hornung alexh@dragonflybsd.org, kernel@lists.dragonflybsd.org

Port bhyve - The BSD Hypervisor

DragonFly has no efficient solution for running other operating systems as guests. Bhyve 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, 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

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 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: Michael Neumann mneumann@ntecs.de, 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)