Summer of Coders at meetBSD

Pawel Solyga, Summer of Coder working with the WinLibre project in 2006 and 2007, also happens to be an 'old hand' with all things BSD. He recently attended the meetBSD Conference and was kind enough to send us a report on the conference. Pawel writes:

Last weekend, I and a few of my friends from Wroclaw University of Technology attended the meetBSD Conference in Warsaw, Poland. The conference focused on different BSD-based operating systems, including FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenSolaris. The agenda included talks in both Polish and English, with most of the presentations in English given by special guests of the FreeBSD project.

We had a great time and learned a lot from all the presentations we attended, but our particular favorites included Kris Kennaway's talk on "New features and improvements in FreeBSD 7" and Slawomir Zak's presentation on "DTrace - Monitoring and tuning your system in XXI century." The organizers will be posting videos and slides from the talks over the next several days, so stay tuned to the conference site.

I also had the chance to give a tech talk detailing the results of FreeBSD and NetBSD's Summer of Code students' work since the program's inception in 2005, focusing on how these contributions have helped to shape the BSD operating systems. I also spent some time reviewing the student projects developed during 2007 in greater detail. If you'd like to check out my presentation, you can either look at a PDF of the slides or check out the interactive Quicktime presentation .

I would like to thank Murray Stokely (Google employee and FreeBSD committer) and the NetBSD Summer of Code team for all the support in both helping me research my presentation and then reviewing several iterations. Thanks also to Google for helping to defray my travel costs. See you next year at meetBSD 2008!

Wroclaw University of Technology students at the meetBSD conference

Many thanks to Pawel for the write up. If you'll be giving a presentation about your Summer of Code activities or have recently attended a great conference, post a comment and let us know!

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.

Summer of Coders at Google: Robert Watson

Robert Watson, organization administrator and mentor for the FreeBSD project, recently visited Google and treated our employees to a talk on "How the FreeBSD Project Works." Robert's talk provided insights into FreeBSD's governance as whole, and his remarks on FreeBSD's processes for onboarding new developers and how their existing structures aided the project's participation in Summer of Code are of particular interest. You can check out the video of Robert's presentation to learn more.

And for those of you who are wondering, you won't necessarily be talked into recording a podcast if you visit Google Mountain View. We might just persuade you to give a talk. Or you can talk us into hosting your talk. Either way works.

Seriously though, when any Summer of Coders are in the Mountain View area, you are most welcome to visit and give a presentation to Googlers about your Summer of Code project or your other open source activities. You know where to find us.

Summer of Coders at BSDCan

BSDCan just wrapped up last week, and three Summer of Code students attended. We heard that Mathieu Prevot had a great time meeting other FreeBSD developers, and Adam Martin gave a talk about his 2006 SoC project on AutoFS. Ivan Voras, now participating in his third SoC and still going strong with the FreeBSD project, gave several talks. He was also kind enough to send us a report from the conference:

I gave two talks at the devsummit and one short talk at the conference. The first devsummit talk was about my Summer of Code project for last year, named "gvirstor". It's a storage virtualization layer ("GEOM class" in FreeBSD terminology) that allows users to create large virtual storage devices backed by limited amounts of physical storage. In concept, it it similar to virtual memory, only applied to storage devices. The practical use of gvirstor is to create a large device (for example, several TB in size) backed by a small number of hard drives (for example, 300 GB total size) then create a file system on it and mount it – adding more hard drives on demand as the physical space gets allocated. I talked mostly about the implementation of gvirstor and its interaction with the UFS file system. This triggered a discussion about the details of GEOM and the file system which was very instructive and I learned a lot from it.

My next talk was about my current Summer of Code project – the new FreeBSD installer. The project is still very much work in progress and I got to present its general architecture. It's a very important project for the FreeBSD community since the current installer (a console UI application) is a decade old and doesn't support many modern features present in FreeBSD. It's also full of little quirks that put people off of trying FreeBSD. The new installer will be an advanced utility with a graphical front-end and a configurable, reusable backend which is scriptable from remote hosts. I gave a shorter version of this talk at the BSDCan "Works in Progress" session in front of a much larger audience. Many people were interested in finstall's progress and gave useful suggestions.

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I'd like to thank the FreeBSD Foundation and Google for sponsoring my trip and making much of the progress possible!

We'd love to hear from any other students who have been presenting their work at technical conferences. What was the experience like? Did you get useful feedback from the audience? Let us know!