2008 Google Summer of Code Highlights 101
andrewmin writes "SoC 2008 has begun, and with 175 organizations and 1125 students it looks better than ever before. Here's a quick run-down of a few programs that, if they are finished, will definitely be making their way onto your machine."
7 slots for DragonFlyBSD (Score:4, Informative)
DragonFly Projects
Enhance dma
* Max Lindner, mentored by Matthias Schmidt
* See EnhanceDmaGSoC for more information
Port DragonFly to the AMD64 architecture
* Jordan Gordeev, mentored by Thomas E. Spanjaard
* See AMD64GSoC for more information.
RFC3542 support
* Dashu Huang, mentored by Hasso Tepper
* The standard application program interface (API) for TCP/IP applications is the "sockets" interface. Although this API was developed for Unix in the early 1980s, it has also been implemented on DragonFly BSD with support for IPv6 applications. Today, to fit new demands, the API standard that support IPv6 applications has experience some changes from RFC2292 to RFC3542. However, the DragonFly BSD operating system now only support RFC2292, and it don't support RFC3542 advanced sockets API, to make it catch up the change, we need to make it support RFC3542. To make DragonFly BSD support RFC3542. My work will research the codes of current IPv6 stack in DragonFly BSD and understand how it works. At the same time, I should understand some related RFC, and how other BSD's such as FreeBSD, openBSD, merged RFC3542. Through this way, I can figure out which part of the old IPv6 stack should be improved. Finally,I will update the old IPv6 stack to make it support RFC3542.
Extend Multi-Processing (MP) support
* Robert Luciani, mentored by Simon Schubert
* Back in 2003 when DragonFly was born, the first subsystem to be implemented was the LWKT. The reduction in complexity achieved by using message passing (as opposed to a shared memory environment using locks) was undeniable. What was also "unlocked" though, was the potential for near linear performance scaling on multiple CPU systems. Unfortunately many kernel systems, such as the network stack, need to be modified to take advantage of this potential, since they are still encumbered by a legacy "Big Giant Lock". In this project I will remove the MP lock in important areas of the kernel that have a direct affect on the performance of popular programs such as PostgreSQL.
Proportional share userland scheduling algorithm
* Mayur Narayan Bhosle, mentored by Jeffrey Hsu
* Proportional share algorithms like lottery scheduling, Stride scheduling algorithm guarantee proportional share of resources like (CPU) to a processes as per their requirement stated specified during the start. The traditional schedulers achieve fairness or resource allocation by adjusting priority, but the effect is observed over a long term. But instead in case of proportional share schedulers we observe the fairness of allocation over a bounded period of time when we adjust the requirement of resources dynamically.
Anticipatory disk I/O scheduler
* Nirmal Thacker, mentored by Simon Schubert
* This project aims at developing an Anticipatory Disk I/O scheduler for DragonFlyBSD. An Anticipatory Disk I/O scheduler will ensure that an anticipation heuristic will nullify all possible deceptive idleness between consecutive disk accesses and at the same time try to maintain an overall good throughput. In the DragonFly BSD operating system it must also take into consideration the MP- safety factors.
LiveCD with a DragonFly-specific X desktop
* Louisa Luciani, mentored by Sascha Wildner
* In this project I will integrate more functionality into the nrelease build system. The build will generate a persistent liveCD with Dragonfly specific features. It will be customized for recovery, demonstr
coral cache link (Score:3, Informative)
Server dying (Score:3, Informative)
-FST (anonymous to prevent karma whoring)
Waste of time... (Score:1, Informative)
The photo tagging stuff Re: gallery made me laugh, are google sponsoring weekend projects now?
Re:stop hating on mplayer (Score:2, Informative)
Gecko-mediaplayer (browser plugin) and gnome-mplayer (clean GTK GUI for mplayer that gecko-mediaplayer uses over dbus) really try and give the best browser plugin support for firefox on linux.
You can find out more about them here: http://dekorte.homeip.net/download/ [homeip.net]
Re:Pidgin projects are cool (Score:3, Informative)
Dojo (Score:2, Informative)
from the aptitude-gtk guy (Score:5, Informative)
If you've used both Synaptic and Aptitude, you should have seen some differences
The dependency resolution is one point, but it's not only that. The whole navigation in Aptitude is just much more efficient. Ever used Synaptic in a mixed-distribution install ? Say you want to install another version of a package and it has some different dependencies. Good luck navigating them in Synaptic. It's really not designed with that in mind.
You can see the full application here [milliways.fr] and my development blog here [milliways.fr]
I warmly welcome any input on my project!
at less than 2% (Score:5, Informative)
Captain obvious points out that highlighting even just one project for half of the participating orgs would be about 88 projects and would still represent less than 8%. There's also no guarantee that the student will be successful on their project. About one in five students failed last year, so nothing is guaranteed regardless.
My point? There is a LOT of cool stuff being worked on. Check the projects out for yourself at http://code.google.com/soc/2008/ [google.com]
They're all listed. Show your support, get involved, help them succeed if you really care.
Re:Cross-Platform? (Score:3, Informative)
For you this means Windows looks like Windows, and Mac looks like Mac. The running application may be written for KDE, but this doesn't matter anymore.
Re:Multithreading way more important. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:7 slots for DragonFlyBSD (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.ibeentoubuntu.com/2008/04/where-do-we-go-from-here-now-that-gnome.html [ibeentoubuntu.com]
Re:E17? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:stop hating on mplayer (Score:3, Informative)
mplayer seems very conservative about pre-buffering before starting playback and doesn't seem to change anything when I try to adjust the buffer size in preferences. It doesn't always respond directly to commands (like play, or seeking in a stream), which often sets it to more buffering (even when it already seemed to have loaded). Whereas VLC tends to start playback pretty quickly (without running into buffer underruns).
It is a shame, though, that there is literally no UI to speak of for the VLC plugin. Either the video is playing or you're looking at black window reading "(no video)".
Re:Cross-Platform? (Score:3, Informative)
I guess it doesn't matter much what I consider a port, but when users are accustomed to features working across all their applications on an OS, when they don't, well they throw that application into the same bin as OpenOffice and often look for better more "native" solutions; regardless of whether or not the application was originated on another OS.
Certainly they make an effort to make things closer to the experience with native applications, but they also try to reuse as much as possible, which often results in sort of a "least common denominator" effect. You end up with applications that can't use any features of any OS that are not also present in all the other OS's supported (or sometimes only features in one OS, making it like a port in this regard).
I didn't think I was painting a grim picture. I was just trying to be realistic. For now QT is Linux first, and everything else second. The functionality it affords reflects this. Most of the developers are on Linux and primarily targeting it and many don't even know about the features of OS X and Vista that they aren't supporting, because they don't use those OS's enough to be familiar with said features.
They are a good step towards letting developers quickly target multiple platforms and keep an application up to date on all of them, but they are certainly not providing the same level of quality and functionality that truly native applications do. Perhaps in the future that will no longer be the case. In the mean time, well maybe I can recommend some apps to people who don't use Linux, but who might like apps that right now are Linux only.