Now’s the time to put in your application for Summer of Code projects, if you’re a student. The application period runs until May 3rd. There’s already been some proposals on the mailing lists; now they can be put in officially.
I’ll point out the last link is from a returning GSoC student, and has a lot of detail; use that as an example if you’re thinking about your own application.
For anyone who is a student considering Google Summer of Code this year: this timeframe we’re in right now is listed by Google as time for “students discuss project ideas with mentoring organizations”. This is the perfect time to find out what the people in an organization are like, and get early feedback on your project ideas.
Chances are, if you’re submitting a proposal for an idea from an org’s project list, you’re one of a number of students all trying for the same thing. The best way to get accepted instead of any other applicant is to be the person they already know.
The DragonFly page on the Summer of Code site is set up. If you are a potential mentor that I’ve talked to before, I’ve already sent you an email with details. If you are a potential mentor I haven’t talked to, you can email me or send a request via the DragonFly page. (Google has a new ‘connections’ method for signup this year.)
If you’re an interested student, take a look at the DragonFly Projects Page. Keep in mind that your proposal does not have to be one of those ideas – new projects are always welcome, and often have the advantage of being unique instead of being one of several similar proposals. (hint, hint)
We’re accepted! The application requirements, etc. will be up on the Google Summer of Code site as soon as I can fill out the forms.
I’ve put in an application for DragonFly to be a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization for the 6th year in a row – we have mentors lined up, so we’ll know by the Friday after next. See my post on kernel@ for pretty much what I just said.
Meaning, Summer of Code for the teachers, not the students. Google apparently has a grant program for academic researchers, that runs twice a year. I didn’t know this, but I bet there’s someone who is 1: in academia and 2: needs cash money that is 3: reading this.
If DragonFly is going to participate in Google Summer of Code for 2013, we need project ideas, and lots of them, at any size. There’s an existing project page that anyone can add to, especially if you’re a student and looking to add your ideas.
It’s announced! If DragonFly is going to participate again for the sixth year in a row (wow!), we need mentor volunteers…
Google is hosting a ‘Doc Camp’, where people get together and write documentation for open source projects. There’s a page that talks about it. Last year’s inaugural event was apparently quite successful. I haven’t been to it, but I think a day just for documentation is a good idea.
If you ever wanted to read an extensive discussion about the scheduler, today’s your day. Mihai Carabas, who posted the details of a long discussion he had with Matthew Dillon about how the scheduler works. You may recall Mihai’s name from the very successful GSoC scheduler project that recently finished.
(look, a link to the new Mailman archive!)
DragonFly had a successful Google Summer of Code even this year. It marks our 5th time participating, 7th if you count Google Code-In events.
Mihai Carabas worked on adding SMT/HT awareness to the DragonFly scheduler. This project was very successful. The original goal was just to take advantage of threading with the scheduler, but the benchmarks published by Mihai show in general a 5% speedup from these scheduler changes. His work has already been committed.
Vishesh Yadav implemented an inotify interface in DragonFly. inotify is an originally Linux-based system for monitoring files and directories for changes. A specific use for this is an inotify-aware locate program, so that a list of file locations can be kept ‘live’. His code for the inotify interface should be committed to DragonFly very soon.
(This was written in part for Google to use on their Open Source Blog.)
I was on the road and missed last week’s summaries for Summer of Code, and we’re almost at the end of the session, so I’ll just link to the most recent items from Mihai Carabas (there’s a lot there!), Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Freitas.
Mihai Carabas has posted some more results from an 8-core system showing his efforts to make the scheduler multi-threading aware. The results are generally a 5% speed gain, which I think matches previous benchmarks on machines with less processors.
I hope it’s week 8. Anyway here’s the reports from Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas.
At least for DragonFly, every current participant in Google Summer of Code passed the midterm evaluation. Yay!
Here’s the regular status updates for Mihai Carabas (scheduler) and Vishesh Yadav (inotify). I don’t have the update from Ivan Sichmann Freitas yet. Here’s Ivan Sichmann Freitas.
The usual weekly updates from Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas. Mihai has some interesting bugs found this past week by running his code on Matt Dillon’s 48-core system.
Attention students and mentors: the Summer of Code midterms open up on July 9th. This means students fill out an evaluation, and mentors also fill out an evaluation. Don’t forget, because completed evals from mentor and student both are necessary for a project to continue being funded.
This is a report for last week’s work, so this is week 6 we are in now, and the reports are week 5′s status. So:
If you have an Intel processor with multiple cores and hyperthreading support, you can compile a new kernel and try out Mihia Carabas’s GSoC work already; he’s created a test using the OpenSSL test case to time scheduling performance vs. number of threads.
Mihai Carabas posted some benchmarks for his work with the DragonFly default scheduler and hyperthreaded CPUs. The end result, for those who don’t like number analysis, is that CPU-dependent speeds are reliably constant because tasks are being evenly scheduled across available CPUs.
(Well, CPU threads, since this is hyperthreading, but you get the idea.)
I think it’s week four, at least.
Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas all have their weekly status reports up for Summer of Code. Unfortunately, Loganaden Velvindron received a great job offer out of the blue, so he no longer has time for Summer of Code. (He plans to continue involvement in DragonFly, however.)
Here’s your most recent weekly round of DragonFly/Google Summer of Code updates:
Week 2 Summer of Code status reports from Loganaden Velvindron, Mihai Carabas (plus followup), Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas are available. Ivan Sichmann Freitas also has a RFC on changes to DragonFly’s 32-bit API.
Three more weekly status updates from DragonFly/GSoC students: Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas. That’s all for the past/first week.
Loganaden Velvindron posted a terse update on the state of his Summer of Code work for DragonFly. I’m still waiting on the other students.
Each of the 4 DragonFly participants for Summer of Code have posted an introductory email and details of their projects. Here’s direct links to their posts for your reading convenience:
(Yes, same format as my last post, but now the links are to their posts, not the sparse Google info pages.)
Google has announced their projects accepted for Summer of Code: DragonFly has 4 projects of the 1,212 funded:
(Hopefully those links are to visible pages) We had way more good proposals than available mentors/slot, unfortunately. So if you didn’t get in, think about next year, or maybe look at doing the work on your own; there’s some great ideas out there that I’d like to see happen.
DragonFly has been given 6 slots (i.e. spaces for students) by Google for this year’s Summer of Code. That’s great! We have a crop of great student proposals this year, so far, so the biggest worry at this point is how to get to them all.
Student applications for Google Summer of Code (and DragonFly) can now be submitted, until April 6th. Now’s your chance!
Here’s the page, with a convenient mentor application note at the bottom. That’s the next step, so if you were thinking of mentoring, now is the time.
The organization application for DragonFly is in for Google Summer of Code. If you are thinking of working as a mentor or as a student, please let me know soon! We will know if we’re accepted (for the 5th time!) on the 16th.
Nick Prokharau’s project for Google Summer of Code last year was “Port PUFFS from NetBSD/FreeBSD”. Sascha Wildner has now committed that to DragonFly. It’s experimental, so the normal caveats apply.
It’s on, again! Not that there was any doubt. I need to collect potential mentor names before DragonFly can be involved, so you can guess what I’ll say next…
That would be a recent ATI card, though I don’t know exactly which model name. Samuel Greear has imported David Shao’s DRM work, originally for Summer of Code, last year. Most newer Radeons should work (?).
DragonFly had another good year with Google’s Summer of Code program. We had 6 slots, and 5 passed projects. (Irinia, if you’re reading this – where did you go?) This is our 4th year participating in Summer of Code, with I think the highest number of passed projects to date.
Here’s all the finished projects, with links to the original descriptions:
Thanks is also due to the mentors and other that helped out, via IRC and email: Aggelos Economopoulos, Alex Hornung, Joe Talbott, Matthias Schmidt, Michael Neumann, Nathaniel Filardo, Pratyush Kshirsagar, Sascha Wildner, Thomas Nikolajsen, and Venkatesh Srinivas
You can also check the Digest’s “Google Summer of Code” category for progress reports made as the summer went on. The source code from the projects is available at the DragonFly/SOC 2011 Google Project Page. In even better news, 2 of the projects have already been partially committed to DragonFly – Brills Peng’s scheduler work, and Adam Hoka’s device mapper mirror project.
Brills Peng has written up a nice description of his scheduler work for Google Summer of Code, with details on what it does, and how to try it out. Best of all, he plans to keep working on it!
Another batch of code has arrived from Google Summer of Code student work. In this case, it’s code from Adam Hoka’s “Implementing a mirror target for device mapper” project, committed by Alex Hornung. I think there’s potentially more to come.
Google Summer of Code for 2011 just finished, and there’s already source code from it showing up in DragonFly. In this case, scheduler work, including multiple schedulers. I’ll have a more detailed report soon…
Anton Panev is working on a Google Summer of Code project for NetBSD, adding support in pkgsrc for RPM/Debian package formats. He posted a status report recently; will this come to DragonFly via pkgsrc? I don’t know!
Samuel Greear posted a progress report on his kqueue Summer of Code project. There’s code available now to try it out. It sounds grand, though I can’t identify what effects it will have for the end user.
All 6 Google Summer of Code projects for DragonFly have reached the midterm, and passed!
If you are a Summer of Code student or mentor, make sure you’ve filled out your midterm survey. Without it, your project fails – and they are due for everyone in roughly the next 24 hours!
One of the perpetual questions about Summer of Code is “Why can’t there be documentation projects?”, since most open source projects need docs as badly as code. There’s various reasons that I’m too lazy to research and type out, I’m sure, but Google is sponsoring a “Doc Camp“, in October. You don’t have to be in Summer of Code; you just have to be willing to spend the 17th through the 25th writing documentation. Google pays for room and board, and you can apply for transportation cost coverage. A classy idea, all around. Someone participate and report back!
The Google Summer of Code midterms are coming up, which generally means students get graded on a pass/fail basis for their work so far, and both mentors and students fill out surveys. What’s this mean? It means we’re halfway through six projects!
There’s an update on Stéphanie Ouillon’s Google Summer of Code project, working on the virtio block device driver.
Stéphanie Ouillon has posted extensive details on the Virtio Google Summer of Code project; a few questions are included for anyone who wants to jump in and offer feedback.
One of the Google Summer of Code projects that will be valuable for DragonFly even though it isn’t a DragonFly project: “Add other package formats to pkgsrc”, where pkgsrc can interpret rpm, dpkg, and FreeBSD Ports files. Anyway, the project has a Sourceforge site.
Adam Hoka, a student in Google Summer of Code for DragonFly, has created a wiki page for his device mapper mirroring project. Not a lot there, but I’m happy to see the reference.
And here’s one last writeup/introduction for Google Summer of Code projects on DragonFly: kevent part 2. (Apparently school exams prevented this from being written sooner.)
Kedar Soparkar applied for Google Summer of Code with DragonFly, but didn’t make the cut with the very few slots we have. So, he’s going to work on his i386 ABI implementation anyway. More student work is always wonderful news.
Two more of the DragonFly and Google Summer of Code projects: Irina Presa’s checkpointing vkernels, where you can save a running virtual kernel and start it again later, and Nick Prokharau’s port of PUFFS.
(Anyone know the HTML character code for ‘s’ with an inverted grave mark so I can spell Irina’s name correctly?)
Yay acronyms! Brills Peng was accepted for the Summer of Code project “Improve dsched interfaces and implement BFQ disk scheduling policy” – and now there’s a nice writeup describing what’s planned. Also, Stéphanie Ouillon did the same thing for the virtio drivers project. Adam Hoka also joined in with a summary for his LVM mirror project. Please keep this up, students.
Google’s announced the accepted projects for 2011. DragonFly has 6 slots!
We had a large number of interesting project proposals; far more than than the slots available. If you’re one of the students who did not get in, please consider working on your project as time allows. I know it won’t be lucrative, but I’d still like to see them happen.
Here’s the list of accepted projects:
This upcoming Monday should be exciting! It’s the planned date for the release of DragonFly 2.10. Also, the accepted projects for Google Summer of Code (including for DragonFly) will be announced.
There’s been plenty of discussion about Summer of Code projects on the mailing lists. One conversation about “Implementing a mirror target for the device mapper” led to a longer description from Venkatesh Srinivas about mirroring and how he’s looked at implementation.
Summer of Code 2011 student applications can be made now. If you’re a student, you’ve got until April 8th to get it done! (Calendar) Remember, you can’t be too organized, too early.
I had linked to this before during Summer of Code 2010 before it completed, but an ongoing discussion on the kernel@ mailing list for DragonFly reminded me: a student named Naohiro Aota put together a Gentoo/DragonFly system for SoC 2010, similar to the existing Gentoo/FreeBSD project. He’s interested in working directly with DragonFly, now.
The mentor signup page for Google Summer of Code 2011 is available again, launched using a new interface. If you want to be a mentor, please sign up now. The student application period opens tomorrow!
The mentor signup page for Google Summer of Code 2011 as of this writing still says “We have temporarily disabled the creation of new requests and invites in preparation of the launch of the new UI for Melange later this week.”, as it has said since the 20th.
So, if you’re wanting to mentor, keep an eye on it. I’ll send mentor requests to any of the names on my list of people that have already expressed interest, if I get to a working version of the page before you do…
For the curious, or for those who plan ahead, I posted what’s on the Google Summer of Code student application for DragonFly.
If you were thinking of working on a disk scheduler for DragonFly, this is your lucky day! Brills Peng asked for some overall guidance on how to start on a Summer of Code project. I threw out some general tips, Alex Hornung talked up resources on kernel programming, and Venkatesh Srinivas described exactly what you’d need to write a disk scheduler. There’s about 50% of a whole proposal, prewritten.
We made it into Google Summer of Code for a 4th year! (yay!)
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/show/google/gsoc2011/dragonflybsd
If you want to mentor, apply here:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/mentor/request/google/gsoc2011/dragonflybsd
(You will need to create a login if you don’t have one.) I’m assuming the applicants are going to be people I know with a direct history with DragonFly; otherwise be prepared to give a good history. Signing up to mentor does not mean you must mentor if there aren’t any projects that interest you; it does mean you need to review applications and provide feedback for students March 28th – April 8th.
If you want to be a student with DragonFly:
Check the projects page for ideas:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/gsocprojectspage/
… or come up with your own.
Get your application together by March 28th. Start talking about it on the mailing list or IRC or however as soon as you can; there’s a direct relationship between the amount of preparation we see beforehand and people getting accepted.
Here’s the timeline:
http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2011/timeline
Copied from my email to users@/kernel@, cause it has everything you need.
dragonflybsd.org is down right now, so if you’re looking for the Google Summer of Code ideas page for DragonFly, I have a local mirror of that page.
Update: dragonflybsd.org is back up, but I’ll keep that mirror there just in case…
I forgot to mention it when I did this opening night, but: DragonFly’s application to Google Summer of Code 2011 is in. We find out if we’re accepted on the 18th.
“Arjun S R” wrote to the kernel@ mailing list asking about the Google Summer of Code projects for DragonFly that he found interesting. Samuel Greear has a response so detailed it includes links to a similar project proposed last year. It also works as a good model for how much thought needs to go in before you start.
Update: there’s more, plus some pertinent advice!
I’ve linked to it before, but it’s expanded since: the Google Summer of Code projects page on dragonflybsd.org has a whole lot of ideas listed. Please add to it, especially if there’s a project you’d like to be doing. (Here’s more thoughts, for example.)
Stéphanie Ouillon expressed interest in the virtio drivers as a Google Summer of Code project for DragonFly; Aggelos Economopoulos followed up with an explanation of the various work that’s been done, and further resources. I chimed in with my usual warning.
If you’re interested in mentoring for DragonFly and Google Summer of Code for 2011, please speak up. You don’t have to mentor if you don’t see any projects you like – I just need an initial count for the application. If you don’t want to mentor at all, but you’ve got ideas: there’s a place to tell people about it.
Google Summer of Code is happening again! (FAQ, timeline) Of course, DragonFly will be applying to participate as a mentoring organization again this year. The last several years have all been fruitful with completed projects and new developers, so it’s worth the effort.
The November issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the theme of “Economic Development.” I like the microcredit article, but perhaps that’s just my special interest.
The December issue’s theme is “Humanitarian Open Source” and the guest editor will be Leslie Hawthorn. She’s currently Open Source Outreach Manager at Oregon State University Open Source Lab, but some may remember her as the face of Google Summer of Code for the past several years.
I’ve coded some tasks on the DragonFly projects page for Google Code-In. (Application is in already.) If there’s any additional DragonFly projects appropriate for 13 to 18-year old students, that’s the place to add it. The application period ends the 29th at 23:00 UTC, so don’t take your time.
There’s still no support for KMS/GEM on any most BSDs, though there are people interested in it for FreeBSD. One of DragonFly’s Summer of Code projects was just that, though it’s not in a state where it can be really used.
I’ve applied on behalf of DragonFly for Google Code-In. It’s similar to Google Summer of Code, but focuses on 13-18-year-olds and smaller tasks. It runs over the year-end, and we’ll know if we’re in by November 5th.
In the meantime, if you have ideas that could fit the program (see task list at the Google site), please put them on the DragonFly project page.
All three of the Google Summer of Code Projects for DragonFly are complete and passed! The code for each will show up at the Google-hosted project page in the next week or so. The original proposals for Alex Hornung’s device mapper/LVM, Samuel Greear’s kevent/select/pool work, and David Shao’s GEM/KMS porting are still there on the Google project page for DragonFly.
Samuel J. Greear posted a note about his Summer of Code work, focusing on selective wakeup. He outlined his strategy, and then posted benchmark numbers – using Apache, lighthttpd, and a minimal web server he wrote just to show the improvements from selective wakeup.
