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2008 Google Summer of Code Highlights
andrewmin writes "SoC 2008 has begun, and with 175 organizations and 1125 students it looks better than ever before. Here's a quick run-down of a few programs that, if they are finished, will definitely be making their way onto your machine."
Blue screen at bootup?
Must... resist... urge... to make... Windows BSOD.... joke... aaaaaaargh!
http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/index.cgi/GoogleSoC2008
DragonFly Projects
Enhance dma
* Max Lindner, mentored by Matthias Schmidt
* See EnhanceDmaGSoC for more information
Port DragonFly to the AMD64 architecture
* Jordan Gordeev, mentored by Thomas E. Spanjaard
* See AMD64GSoC for more information.
RFC3542 support
* Dashu Huang, mentored by Hasso Tepper
* The standard application program interface (API) for TCP/IP applications is the "sockets" interface. Although this API was developed for Unix in the early 1980s, it has also been implemented on DragonFly BSD with support for IPv6 applications. Today, to fit new demands, the API standard that support IPv6 applications has experience some changes from RFC2292 to RFC3542. However, the DragonFly BSD operating system now only support RFC2292, and it don't support RFC3542 advanced sockets API, to make it catch up the change, we need to make it support RFC3542. To make DragonFly BSD support RFC3542. My work will research the codes of current IPv6 stack in DragonFly BSD and understand how it works. At the same time, I should understand some related RFC, and how other BSD's such as FreeBSD, openBSD, merged RFC3542. Through this way, I can figure out which part of the old IPv6 stack should be improved. Finally,I will update the old IPv6 stack to make it support RFC3542.
Extend Multi-Processing (MP) support
* Robert Luciani, mentored by Simon Schubert
* Back in 2003 when DragonFly was born, the first subsystem to be implemented was the LWKT. The reduction in complexity achieved by using message passing (as opposed to a shared memory environment using locks) was undeniable. What was also "unlocked" though, was the potential for near linear performance scaling on multiple CPU systems. Unfortunately many kernel systems, such as the network stack, need to be modified to take advantage of this potential, since they are still encumbered by a legacy "Big Giant Lock". In this project I will remove the MP lock in important areas of the kernel that have a direct affect on the performance of popular programs such as PostgreSQL.
Proportional share userland scheduling algorithm
* Mayur Narayan Bhosle, mentored by Jeffrey Hsu
* Proportional share algorithms like lottery scheduling, Stride scheduling algorithm guarantee proportional share of resources like (CPU) to a processes as per their requirement stated specified during the start. The traditional schedulers achieve fairness or resource allocation by adjusting priority, but the effect is observed over a long term. But instead in case of proportional share schedulers we observe the fairness of allocation over a bounded period of time when we adjust the requirement of resources dynamically.
Anticipatory disk I/O scheduler
* Nirmal Thacker, mentored by Simon Schubert
* This project aims at developing an Anticipatory Disk I/O scheduler for DragonFlyBSD. An Anticipatory Disk I/O scheduler will ensure that an anticipation heuristic will nullify all possible deceptive idleness between consecutive disk accesses and at the same time try to maintain an overall good throughput. In the DragonFly BSD operating system it must also take into consideration the MP- safety factors.
LiveCD with a DragonFly-specific X desktop
* Louisa Luciani, mentored by Sascha Wildner
* In this project I will integrate more functionality into the nrelease build system. The build will generate a persistent liveCD with Dragonfly specific features. It will be customized for recovery, demonstr
It seems slow, so have a mirror: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com.nyud.net/columns/2008_google_summer_code_21_projects_im_excited_about
Since VLCs firefox plugin is incompatible with noscript, I've started using mplayer, and as its modular (unlike VLC) I can also throw almost anything at it (actually I can throw more at it as it handles realmedia too). As for interfaces well i personally think Kmplayer beats VLC hands down as a media player too.
I also dont understand the need for a frontend to aptitude, apt + front end is just as powerful, its only dependency resolution that hasn't been well implemented in other front ends.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Nope. I see nothing there that will be on my machine in the foreseeable future.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Coral Cache link: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com.nyud.net/columns/2008_google_summer_code_21_projects_im_excited_about
-FST (anonymous to prevent karma whoring)
My personal favorites are the project to add Voice and Video to pidgin and the Pidgin theming project. http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GSoC2008/VoiceAndVideo and http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GSoC2008/ThemeImprovements . People always ask for these things and the developers don't have time to do things that they don't use, so they never get done. Hopefully these actually get done by the end of this summer.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Editing menu.lst hardly qualifies as a GUI.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Hi, I'm the Aptitude-gtk applicant. :) .
If you've used both Synaptic and Aptitude, you should have seen some differences
The dependency resolution is one point, but it's not only that. The whole navigation in Aptitude is just much more efficient. Ever used Synaptic in a mixed-distribution install ? Say you want to install another version of a package and it has some different dependencies. Good luck navigating them in Synaptic. It's really not designed with that in mind.
You can see the full application here and my development blog here
I warmly welcome any input on my project!
Kudos to the few mentioned that will get some extra attention from this, but it's worth noting that the coverage doesn't represent even 2% of the projects that will be going on. I'd even go so far to say as many of those listed aren't even some of the most impressive or realistic, just one person's sampling of a few they know about.
Captain obvious points out that highlighting even just one project for half of the participating orgs would be about 88 projects and would still represent less than 8%. There's also no guarantee that the student will be successful on their project. About one in five students failed last year, so nothing is guaranteed regardless.
My point? There is a LOT of cool stuff being worked on. Check the projects out for yourself at http://code.google.com/soc/2008/
They're all listed. Show your support, get involved, help them succeed if you really care.
Cheers!
Sean
Except that x264 is already the most efficient multithreaded encoder in the open source world. I don't see what you mean; there is no such thing as an x264 "video format"; its called H.264, and given that x264 is an encoder and not a decoder, it isn't exactly our job to do multithreading, given that we don't even have a decoder to implement such a thing in!
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
Many GRUB developers are working diligently toward a production ready version of GRUB 2. I am a new contributor to the GRUB project and the reason I chose this feature to implement is because it meshes with my areas of expertise and interest. Also, I feel that making GRUB 2 usable by everyone (let's face it, right now that means it has to be supported by Ubuntu) is a very important goal. In order for Ubuntu to adopt GRUB 2, it will have to not only be functionally complete, but they will want it to look nice too, as the rest of the OS will.
No argument that it will be great to have GRUB 2 production ready. I am looking forward to it, and I hope I can contribute to other features after I complete the graphical menu system.
Colin
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
A nice UI may be more important for a Live CD install/rescue disk, for instance, where there are many choices, and you want it to simple to use and self-explanatory for any user booting the disk. Also, GRUB 2 uses dynamically loadable modules for virtually everything, so you can just not load the future 'gfxmenu' module if you like. Then it will consume no memory and will not be a possible source of problems.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome