Re: Interesting GSoC project ideas for 09

[phcoder <phcoder@gmail.com>]

Robert Millan wrote:
> Seems nice.  Would you be willing to write a summary for these?  Then we
> could add it to grub-soc.html.
Where is this file?
Here is elaborated list:
HID:
-bluetooth keyboard
Often BIOS lacks bluetooth support completely. This means that if 
someone uses bluetooth keyboard he may even need a separate ps/2 or usb 
keyboard just to make his choice in grub. Implementing bluetooth stack 
is a difficult task
-mouse support
This feature isn't something that is really useful. It's actually just 
to make the bootloader nicer. It requires some changes in the grub's 
design to be able to receive output from multiple sources in the same 
time. This architecture change can be reused later for e.g recieving 
input from both keyboard and serial or keyboard+ssh.
More graphics drivers
FS:
-zfs
It's mentionned in original e-mail. ZFS is a filesystem with many 
features absent in classical filesystems, like e.g. snapshotting. It's 
used by Solaris/OpenSolaris and FreeBSD. A port to fuse in linux exists 
but is too slow to consider booting from zfs with linux
-btrfs
A conceptual replacement for ZFS for linux. Contains some features 
absent from both ZFS and classical FS. For more details 
http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
-Hammer (dragonflybsd)
It's a new feature of DragonFlyBSD. I don't know how it is better then 
FFS or ZFS
Network
-TCP/IP
For many netbooting purposes a fairly complete TCP/IP stack is 
necessary. Marco Gerards has some very basic code but said that it 
shouldn't hold anybody interested in TCP/IP back
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/lwip/ or freebsd could be the base 
of port. Following protocols need TCP/IP:
-TFTP
TFTP is a UDP-only protocol similar to very basic FTP used to transfer 
kernels and configuration in classical netboot environment
-NFS
NFS is usually used to mount remote root filesystem. Its support in grub 
can facilitate netbooting
-SMB
SMB is the protocol for which it's the easiest to setup a server. 
Windows, MacOS and many linux distribution propose GUI for it. Many 
organisations have an SMB server. Its support can make netbooting as 
trivial as "put this iso into your shared folder"
-FTP, HTTP and DNS
These are the most used protocol for internet servers. It's also heavily 
used to distribute OpenSource software. If grub2 supports at least FTP 
or HTTP and DN,. distributions like ubuntu and debian can put a 
configuration file on their server. Then user can just type
configfile (http,debian.org)/grub.cfg
Then a menu with mirrors will appear (random default selection is very 
useful in this context), after mirrors user can choose a version and/or 
variant. Then grub2 will download corresponding kernel and initrd. In 
this way installation doesn't need anything else then grub2 and internet 
access. No CD burning,...
Wireless stack
Wifi becomes more and more commonplace. If grub2 supports wireless the 
previous scenarios can even be done in wireless environment. IMO target 
cards should be intel and atheros because they have opensource drivers
Firewire
It's sometimes used for external harddrives, however USB2 is much more 
common. However it has an advantage of being symmetric. It means that a 
computer can also present itself as a disk. It's useful for cloning and 
disaster recovery
Scripts:
-Finish scripting engine, loops, functions, pipes,...
Scripting engine is still incomplete
-Runtime autoconfig.
It scans all the drives and creates a list of detected OSes in grub2. 
Very useful for demonstrations and recovery.

Realmode hooks
some tools are able to hook themselves onto bios interrupts to fool 
chainloaded bootloader. This includes map and memdisk. It's also 
possible to put dummies on interrupts under coreboot it may be enough in 
some cases instead of complete SeaBIOS

-- 

Regards
Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko