Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on introducing students to open source software development. Students work on a 3 month programming project with an open source organization during their break from university. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together 13,000+ student participants and 12,000 mentors from over 125 countries worldwide. Google Summer of Code has produced 33,000,000+ lines of code for 608 open source organizations.
HelenOS
HelenOS participates in GSoC 2018 as part of the Microkernel Devroom umbrella organization.
HelenOS is a portable microkernel-based multiserver operating system designed and implemented from scratch. It decomposes key operating system functionality such as file systems, networking, device drivers and graphical user interface into a collection of fine-grained user space components that interact with each other via message passing. A failure or crash of one component does not directly harm others. HelenOS is therefore flexible, modular, extensible, fault tolerant and easy to understand.
HelenOS does not aim to be a clone of any existing operating system and trades compatibility with legacy APIs for cleaner design. Most of HelenOS components have been made to order specifically for HelenOS so that its essential parts can stay free of adaptation and glue layers, franken-components and the maintenance burden incurred by them.
HelenOS runs on seven different processor architectures and machines ranging from embedded ARM devices and single-board computers through multicore 32-bit and 64-bit desktop PCs to 64-bit Itanium and SPARC rack-mount servers.
Students
If you are interested in working on one of our project ideas below, please get in touch with us on our mailing list and/or IRC channel. In order for you to qualify, we would like to invite you to demonstrate your ability and determination to work on HelenOS during Google Summer of Code 2018 by completing a small programming task before the student application deadline on April 23rd 2018. You should check out the latest master branch of HelenOS, build the system, then think of a small programming task, implement it, test it and submit the patch to us. The programming task should be ideally related to your proposal, but can also be an unrelated bug fix or enhancement of your choice.
Ideas List
The ideas below will take you to our bug tracker. The tickets presented here have been specifically prepared and enhanced for GSoC. Note that it is possible to propose also other projects ideas than those on the list. In that case, please make sure to find a potential mentor.
Userspace device drivers development
- Implement virtio-net driver
- Implement Xen PV network device driver
- Raspberry Pi USB controller driver
- USB support on BeagleBoard XM and BeagleBone computers
- USB DisplayLink driver
- Driver for Broadcom VideoCore IV (Raspberry Pi)
- AC'97 Audio driver
