A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Matthew Dillon’s committed the work by Daniel Flores on Hammer 2 compression and Mihai Carabas’s vkernel hardware support – both Summer of Code projects. There’s a good amount of detail in the commit messages describing the work and what it changed; I expect more Summer of Code work to be getting committed…
Note: you’ll want to do a full update.
We’re in the last week of what has been a very good Summer of Code for DragonFly, and here’s the last reports. (We’re missing two, but this is cleanup week, so not much to report)
I know this is late; my schedule is a bit messed up. This is the penultimate week!
Almost done with this year’s GSoC. It’s been astonishingly… easy? The students are working and the problems are difficult, but there’s been very little in the way of crisis.
Only 3 more Mondays left in the student work part of Summer of Code! Unsurprisingly, it seems the students are mostly in the cleanup phase – as it should be.
I’m running a bit behind because I’ve been on the road, but here they are:
If you look at the reports from students this week, they are mostly “I had bugs and I fixed them and there’s not much to do other than test”, which is the sign of well-planned projects. Here’s the status reports:
Everyone passed their Summer of Code midterms! Not that this was a surprise; all the students have been consistently working and overcoming problems, but a 100% pass rate makes me happy.
Here’s the status reports:
Joris Giovannangeli, one of the Summer of Code students for DragonFly, posted his thoughts on credential descriptors – have a read. He is working on capsicum and DragonFly, so this is a natural thought process.
Every year, people ask “Why can’t writing documentation be part of Summer of Code?” (Not necessarily for DragonFly, but in general) Google has a “Doc Camp”, where a whole lot of documentation gets produced in sprints, and anyone can participate – not just Summer of Code students.
If this sounds interesting to you, your application has to be in by August 7th 9th. (URL and date updated)
It’s week 6, I think, and the midterms are coming up. Here’s the status reports:
I’m late for this, even though the students weren’t. Mea culpa! There’s been a lot of discussion on IRC, in EFNet #dragonflybsd, between the students and various DragonFly developers.
We’ve never had a group of student post progress this regularly. It’s great!
Week 3 is underway, and the students are starting to get into the meat of their projects:
All the Summer of Code students for DragonFly have posted their second week reports:
There’s a lot of progress for the second week, which is wonderful!
Earlier this week, Daniel Flores posted the first-week report on his Google Summer of Code project, file compression in Hammer. He mentioned that the LZ4 algorithm he is using seems to have the best performance with repeating text data, as in logfiles. I asked for numbers, and he provided them. The important data in the results is the total compression column. It shows how many 64k blocks were able to be compressed, with that type of data.
All the Summer of Code students for DragonFly have posted their first week reports:
If any of these projects are interesting to you, or if you have any tips for these students on work they are doing, please provide feedback.
Larisa Grigore posted an introduction of her Summer of Code project: Userland System V IPC in userland, and Daniel Flores wrote out his initial ideas for Hammer compression. That’s the remaining two projects introduced. If any of these interest you or you want to make suggestions, respond on the lists. Work starts on the 17th.
Pawel Dziepak has posted details on his Summer of Code project for DragonFly. He will be making it possible to checkpoint vkernels, restoring network and console state. He even has a public repository for his work set up.
Another DragonFly/Google Summer of Code project introduction is up: Mihai Carabas wrote out his project on developing hardware nested page table support for vkernels. If Mihai’s name seems familiar, it’s because he was in Summer of Code for DragonFly last year, with a successful project.