Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Updates from FreeBSD

FreeBSD mentored 25 students this year, achieving a fantastic final success rate of 92%. Murray Stokely, one of their organization administrators, has written a more detailed summary of FreeBSD's 2007 Summer of Code experience, but here are a few highlights:

During the first Summer of Code in 2005, Ivan Voras worked for the first time with FreeBSD on implementing a journaling storage system. You can read more about that project in Dr. Dobb's Journal. In 2006, Ivan returned to work on the storage visualization layer. This year he turned his attention to FreeBSD's graphical installation tools and finstall project involved making a number of improvements to livecd support and FreeBSD base system utilities. Ivan also produced a full graphical installer, including complete ISO images for users.

In addition to successfully finishing his FreeBSD on MacBook project, Rui Paulo has just become the newest developer with full commit access to the FreeBSD source code repository. This summer Rui developed a number of new device drivers and submitted several important bug fixes to make it easier to run FreeBSD on MacBook hardware.

Zhouyi Zhou
wrote a logging and test case framework for the FreeBSD Mandatory Access Control Framework, designed to test the correct passing of the security label from userland to kernel and the non-bypassibility of Mandatory Access Control Hooks. His work identified two security vulnerabilities which were promptly fixed.

We've only highlighted a few of the FreeBSD projects here, and we would love to hear more from the community about their favorite FreeBSD projects from Summer of Code 2007 or years past. Post a comment and share your thoughts with us.

Congratulations to all of FreeBSD's mentors and students, as well as the FreeBSD community, for their third year of successful participation in Summer of Code!

Note: Murray Stokely is a Google employee as well as a committer for the FreeBSD project.

6 comments:

Murray said...

Alexander Leidinger and others have pointed out that the sensors-framework project by Constantine A. Murenin, deserves a special mention here. Constantine adopted parts of the work of the mentioned MacOS project by Rui Paulo.

The driver which takes care of the power saving and detects the temperature on Intel Core CPUs came from the MacOS project, was committed during the GSoC and Constantine quickly incorporated it into his project (patching it to provide the sensors data to his framework as an example of how to use it).

While these two projects were independent, they built on each other and the final result was more than just a simple sum of the parts.

Leslie Hawthorn said...

@ murray: Thanks for the information.

If anyone else would like to share about FreeBSD's successess, we'd love to hear from you.

Murray said...

Congratulations also to Kai Wang, the latest summer of code student to become a full fledged FreeBSD src/ committer. Kai worked on the BSD binutils project with Joseph Koshy this summer.

Leslie Hawthorn said...

@ murray: Woot! Congratulations to Kai!

Thanks for letting us know, Murray.

Murray said...

We've got another new committer I wanted to announce here.

Ulf Lilleenge
has just been granted src commit access to continue his work on
gvinum, csup, and filesystem-related code in general. Congratulations Ulf!

Leslie Hawthorn said...

@ murray: Awesome news and a wonderful way to start the weekend. Thanks Murray!