Re: About GSoC

["Justin C. Sherrill" <justin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, March 18, 2011 11:14 pm, Brills Peng wrote:
> Hello, all:
> I am a junior CS student who want to apply for DragonFly BSD's GSoC
> projects.
> On the ideas list, I find projects related to filesystems and disks quite
> interesting and want to have a try on one of them, but I do not know how
> to
> start because it's the most huge and complicated software I have ever met,
> although I think I meet the prerequisites listed on the wiki page.
>
> I think I need a VM to run DragonflyBSD and it is easy to programme on the
> userland, but I have no idea how to programme and debug with the kernel.
> Do
> you have a toolchain that supports cross building the kernel and debugging
> from outside a VM? Or this can be done in the OS?

Here's a quick list of suggestions; there are others who have done more
programming work who can suggest more in-depth targets:

1: If you don't have a spare machine for DragonFly, VMWare Player will
work to run in emulation.  Virtualbox is also usable, though some people
have reported problems with various versions.  There's also Qemu, which
can be slow.

DragonFly systems are able to run kernels as a userland application, so
you can try out new kernels without having to reboot the machine.  See the
man page for vkernel.

http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=vkernel&section=ANY

Not all the projects require kernel work, nor do you have to stick to the
existing list.

2: DragonFly uses pkgsrc, a cross-platform software installer to manage
software.  Look at this for details:

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/howtos/HowToPkgsrc/

3: If you have a system up and running, 'man development' will get you
started on where to go.  You will need to download the source code, which
is documented in development(7) and many other places.  Ask questions here
or on IRC channel #dragonflybsd on EFNet.

http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=development&section=ANY

4: Start on your application.  There's a form for DragonFly for Summer of
Code that should be on the Google application site.  I know you aren't
sure what to try yet, but I think the process of looking at that
application form will help you focus on what you want to do by giving a
more direct set of targets.