Student Project Ideas

Student Project Ideas

[Russ Meyerriecks]

Hi all,
  I've been hacking on the Linux kernel all semester for my OS:
Internals class. We are given full autonomy in picking our final
programming project and I would love for mine to be /useful/ for the
Linux kernel and not just a theoretical exorcise. If anybody has any
bug fixes or features maybe they never got around to, and would be
suitable for this situation, I would love to hear about them.

Thanks in advance,
 Russ Meyerriecks
 University of Alabama in Huntsville

Re: Student Project Ideas

[Helge Hafting]

Russ Meyerriecks wrote:
> Hi all,
>  I've been hacking on the Linux kernel all semester for my OS:
> Internals class. We are given full autonomy in picking our final
> programming project and I would love for mine to be /useful/ for the
> Linux kernel and not just a theoretical exorcise. If anybody has any
> bug fixes or features maybe they never got around to, and would be
> suitable for this situation, I would love to hear about them.
>
Take a look at:
http://janitor.kernelnewbies.org/


Here you can find many things nobody got around to.
Things like coding style and patch submission is also documented here.

Helge Hafting

Re: Student Project Ideas

[Cong WANG]

2007/3/29, Russ Meyerriecks <datachomper@gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
>   I've been hacking on the Linux kernel all semester for my OS:
> Internals class. We are given full autonomy in picking our final
> programming project and I would love for mine to be /useful/ for the
> Linux kernel and not just a theoretical exorcise. If anybody has any
> bug fixes or features maybe they never got around to, and would be
> suitable for this situation, I would love to hear about them.
>

First, I think you can read the book named "Kernel Projects for
Linux". It's a good book although it's outdated.

Second, in fact, I am also a college student and also want to find a
suitable and real task in linux kernel for me to work on. KJ doesn't
help much. ;-p

And I am wondering why linux kernel didn't attend Google Summer of
Code? Andrew, I hear you are in Google now. Can you tell me the
reason? Thanks very much!

Have fun!

Re: Student Project Ideas

[Ahmed S. Darwish]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 06:32:21PM +0800, Cong WANG wrote:
> 2007/3/29, Russ Meyerriecks <datachomper@gmail.com>:
> >Hi all,
> >  I've been hacking on the Linux kernel all semester for my OS:
> >Internals class. We are given full autonomy in picking our final
> >programming project and I would love for mine to be /useful/ for the
> >Linux kernel and not just a theoretical exorcise. If anybody has any
> >bug fixes or features maybe they never got around to, and would be
> >suitable for this situation, I would love to hear about them.
> >
> 
> First, I think you can read the book named "Kernel Projects for
> Linux". It's a good book although it's outdated.
> 
> Second, in fact, I am also a college student and also want to find a
> suitable and real task in linux kernel for me to work on. KJ doesn't
> help much. ;-p
> 

No, it really helps alot, just be _patient_. For me, I sent a series of dumb
patches at first to use ARRAY_SIZE macro instead of manual computation. Though
the patches were completely braindead, I learnt alot of stuff about how
everything works here. 

Beside sending this KJ patches, I keep reading from Understanding Linux kernel v3
and reading lots of code everyday. Yesterday my first semi-real patch was
accepted in -mm. I'm sure that day by day my patches will be more real and fix
serious issues. 

All of that wouldn't have smoothly happened without the first step, the KJ step ;).

It seems that being a developer in the kernel community is going exactly like how
code goes, _evolution_ not a revolution. You can't be responsible for a good
project directly, just take your way from a janitor to a subsystem maintaner :).
Ofcourse, unless you have an old experience in other OSs (espcifically Unix ones).

Regards,

-- 
Ahmed S. Darwish
http://darwish.07.googlepages.com

Re: Student Project Ideas

[Kyle Moffett]

On Mar 29, 2007, at 16:59:36, Ahmed S. Darwish wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 06:32:21PM +0800, Cong WANG wrote:
>> Second, in fact, I am also a college student and also want to find  
>> a suitable and real task in linux kernel for me to work on. KJ  
>> doesn't help much. ;-p
>
> No, it really helps alot, just be _patient_. For me, I sent a  
> series of dumb patches at first to use ARRAY_SIZE macro instead of  
> manual computation. Though the patches were completely braindead, I  
> learnt alot of stuff about how everything works here.

One thing that I think is fairly non-obvious to newcomers is that  
Linux kernel development is not done at all the way they teach you in  
your Large Scale Software Engineering classes.  Many of those classes  
talk much about careful design (whether top-down, bottom-up, outside- 
in, waterfall, spiral, $BUZZWORD_OF_THE_DAY) and detailed unit- 
testing, whereas Linux kernel development isn't really "designed" at  
all.

Linux is all about evolution: Somebody comes up with a design they  
like and talk about it on LKML, lots of knowledgeable people put in  
input, the design is reworked, repeat.  After a few discussion emails  
(or none at all for small projects), somebody just sits down and  
codes the damn thing.  In a business nobody does any code till they  
have the design finalized, the managers consider the extra coding a  
waste of man-hours, whereas in Linux the whole design process centers  
around writing many subtly different versions of the same thing until  
everybody agrees that it looks right.

Then it gets pulled into Andrew Mortons tree and promptly breaks all  
over the place because people try things you didn't expect.  You then  
get the opportunity to recode half the thing all over again to fix  
the newly discovered deficiencies.  Repeat several times.

After a while it stops crashing peoples boxes and goes into Linus  
tree, but at that point your job is only half done.  Now you have to  
maintain the feature, add patches, improve functionality, and  
continue to be active in the community.

Large college end-of-study projects are single-person activities,  
they want to test _your_ knowledge.  On the other hand Linux kernel  
development is a community exercise, it's trying to use the knowledge  
of thousands to build the best kernel possible.  If you can get  
approval to use the bits of code that many others contribute then  
more power to you.

The other thing to realize about Linux is that it is NOT a "hobbyist"  
OS any more, there are some extremely mission-critical Linux systems  
out in the world which depend on the code quality and efficiency.   
There are few people indeed who can really efficiently increase the  
performance of the Linux schedular or other core subsystems.  Kudos  
to Linus Torvalds, Ingo Molnar, Con Kolivas, Andrew Morton, and  
others too numerous to list for their incredible skill and dedication.

So while it's entirely possible to do innovative dissertation work on  
the Linux kernel with your own private source tree, don't expect to  
go from a cold standing start to having a big project in the upstream  
kernel without investing twice as much time as it was to do the  
dissertation in the first place.  That's not to say that you can't  
always get advice from many others on this mailing list during the  
process, though.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

Re: Student Project Ideas

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Mar 29 2007 18:54, Kyle Moffett wrote:
>
> One thing that I think is fairly non-obvious to newcomers is that Linux kernel
> development is not done at all the way they teach you in your Large Scale
> Software Engineering classes.  Many of those classes talk much about careful
> design (whether top-down, bottom-up, outside-in, waterfall, spiral,
> $BUZZWORD_OF_THE_DAY) and detailed unit-testing, whereas Linux
> kernel development isn't really "designed" at all.

Well, linux kernel is "extreme programming" - hack away until it
works, care about a design shape and stable API later.


Jan
-- 

Re: Student Project Ideas

[Kyle Moffett]

On Mar 29, 2007, at 20:09:11, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> On Mar 29 2007 18:54, Kyle Moffett wrote:
>>
>> One thing that I think is fairly non-obvious to newcomers is that  
>> Linux kernel development is not done at all the way they teach you  
>> in your Large Scale Software Engineering classes.  Many of those  
>> classes talk much about careful design (whether top-down, bottom- 
>> up, outside-in, waterfall, spiral, $BUZZWORD_OF_THE_DAY) and  
>> detailed unit-testing, whereas Linux kernel development isn't  
>> really "designed" at all.
>
> Well, linux kernel is "extreme programming" - hack away until it  
> works, care about a design shape and stable API later.

I somewhat disagree.  Look at the amount of _design_ which is going  
into the linux-virtualization stuff, the replacement SLAB subsystems  
(SLOB/SLUB), or the current queued-spinlock thread.  Admittedly with  
Linux 90% of the design process is rewriting the code a thousand  
times based on comments before it goes into mainline, but that's  
design nonetheless.  It's just evolved-design-by-committee, a very  
knowledgeable committee made of the people who are interested in and  
understand what's going on well enough to give useful input and with  
enough sense of technical value to veto anything with significant  
architectural problems.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

Re: Student Project Ideas

[Stefan Richter]

Russ Meyerriecks wrote:
> If anybody has any bug fixes or features maybe they never got
> around to,

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED
has 1504 hits right now.

> and would be suitable for this situation,

This may be a problem.
-- 
Stefan Richter
-=====-=-=== --== ===-=
http://arcgraph.de/sr/

Re: Student Project Ideas

[Ahmed S. Darwish]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 05:04:08AM -0500, Russ Meyerriecks wrote:
> Hi all,
>  I've been hacking on the Linux kernel all semester for my OS:
> Internals class. We are given full autonomy in picking our final
> programming project and I would love for mine to be /useful/ for the
> Linux kernel and not just a theoretical exorcise. If anybody has any
> bug fixes or features maybe they never got around to, and would be
> suitable for this situation, I would love to hear about them.
> 

I'm a college student too and I wished a wish like that in the past. After 
watching the development process for a while, I realized that somehow
a college final project won't fit with the linux kernel project.
Everything here is done by _evolution_ not a revolution, you'll even see the 
highest matured programmers in this project send little patches day by day. 

And the problem that you can't meet your PH.D and tell him/her: hey, I have
a patch or two, they simply don't understand that ;).

Second, I think it's very hard to make a considerable project in the kernel
without doing some little patches here and there at first. Google for kernel
newbies and kernel janitors.

Regards,

-- 
Ahmed S. Darwish
http://darwish.07.googlepages.com

Re: Student Project Ideas

[Lee Revell]

On 3/29/07, Russ Meyerriecks <datachomper@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>   I've been hacking on the Linux kernel all semester for my OS:
> Internals class. We are given full autonomy in picking our final
> programming project and I would love for mine to be /useful/ for the
> Linux kernel and not just a theoretical exorcise. If anybody has any
> bug fixes or features maybe they never got around to, and would be
> suitable for this situation, I would love to hear about them.

You could try to get scheduling latency down into the 1-2ms range
without resorting to kernel preemption.  rt_secret_rebuild is the main
problem - it does not take any spinlocks, and is not a hot path, but
runs in softirq context and is thus non-preemptible.  Even if you
don't succeed you'll acquire a deep knowledge of the networking code.

Lee

Re: Student Project Ideas

[Pavel Machek]

Hi!

>  I've been hacking on the Linux kernel all semester for 
>  my OS:
> Internals class. We are given full autonomy in picking 
> our final
> programming project and I would love for mine to be 
> /useful/ for the
> Linux kernel and not just a theoretical exorcise. If 
> anybody has any
> bug fixes or features maybe they never got around to, 
> and would be
> suitable for this situation, I would love to hear about 
> them.

netnice would be nice. As in netnice -n 19 wget interesting_video.

							Pavel
-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html

Re: Student Project Ideas

[Gerb Stralko]

http://www.netnice.org/

it does exactly that...this project started at my college, and we've
done some cool research with this little project. Take a look, alot of
research papers too...

On 3/30/07, Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> >  I've been hacking on the Linux kernel all semester for
> >  my OS:
> > Internals class. We are given full autonomy in picking
> > our final
> > programming project and I would love for mine to be
> > /useful/ for the
> > Linux kernel and not just a theoretical exorcise. If
> > anybody has any
> > bug fixes or features maybe they never got around to,
> > and would be
> > suitable for this situation, I would love to hear about
> > them.
>
> netnice would be nice. As in netnice -n 19 wget interesting_video.
>
>                                                         Pavel
> --
> (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
> (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/
>

Re: Student Project Ideas

[Pavel Machek]

Hi!

> http://www.netnice.org/
> 
> it does exactly that...this project started at my 
> college, and we've
> done some cool research with this little project. Take a 
> look, alot of
> research papers too...

Looks freeebsd only, so ideal chance for student project :-).

								Pavel

> >>  I've been hacking on the Linux kernel all semester 
> >for
> >>  my OS:
> >> Internals class. We are given full autonomy in picking
> >> our final
> >> programming project and I would love for mine to be
> >> /useful/ for the
> >> Linux kernel and not just a theoretical exorcise. If
> >> anybody has any
> >> bug fixes or features maybe they never got around to,
> >> and would be
> >> suitable for this situation, I would love to hear 
> >about
> >> them.
> >
> >netnice would be nice. As in netnice -n 19 wget 
> >interesting_video.
> >
> >                                                        Pavel
> >--
> >(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
> >(cesky, pictures) 
> >http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
> >-
> >To unsubscribe from this list: send the line 
> >"unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> >the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> >More majordomo info at  
> >http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> >Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/
> >
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line 
> "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  
> http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html