Suggested Projects 2007
Last updated: 13/03/07
The following is a list of projects and assigned mentors that is just a taster for what you may like to propose in your student application for the Google Summer of Code. We hope this list spreads a wide variety of fields, from high performance computing and security based tasks, graphical user interface programming and virtualization, to programming for freedom to create a 100% open source operating system. We hope these projects will help inspire you to suggesting something new. You can also check out OpenSolaris GSoC 2006 ideas.Good luck!
We are still in the process of finalizing mentors for these projects, and will update the page accordingly.
High Performance Computing / Mathematics
Porting Fast Fourier Transform Tools, Rob Giltrap
Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is a technique used for many purposes in the field of mathematics. In particular, thousands of people around the world are using their spare computer cycles in the search for Mersenne primes! The key computational element within these Mersenne prime applications are FFTs. This task involves compiling and porting some of the tools (mprime, glucas, mlucas) used to find Marsenne Primes to OpenSolaris, getting to know performance techniques to tune them (prefetch), and finally writing a small GUI application (including a panel applet or notification icon) to manage the running and monitoring of assignments. Experience in dealing with large and voluntary distributed computer communities, and high performance computing would help.
Security
Racoon IKE
Currently there is no open source IKE daemon for IPsec in OpenSolaris since the Solaris binary product releases use a closed source system. This task has two parts, the first part is to make Racoon work on OpenSolaris using the PF_KEY interface with as little change to Racoon as possible. The second part is to investigate using the OpenSolaris Key Management Framework to do provide the CLI for generating certs/keys and the KMF API as a replacement for what Racoon uses - this will give Racoon access to hardware acceleration for the RSA/DSA/D-H crypto.
IPsec and IPfilter Rules GUI
This task involves the development of a local GTK+ based GUI for creating IPfilter, NAT and IPsec/IKE rules on OpenSolaris. The GUI needs to be able to read any existing ipf.conf and ipsecinit.conf rules and also to be able to generate them from scratch. The GUI needs to be able to load/save not only the system default locations but from arbitrary files.
Freedom!
OpenSolaris Emancipation
When Sun released the source code for the Solaris operating system, it still contained a few closed proprietary binaries, a few of which have since been released. However, OpenSolaris can still not be built from fully open source components. This task would evaluate the current functionality of the closed source and develop replacements in a clean room engineering environment.
DTrace
DTrace and Firefox, Alfred Peng
DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic framework available on OpenSolaris. Firefox is a browser. Ideally they can be a match made in heaven, but few until now have taken on the task of bringing them together. This task involves a case study of Firefox performance, including latency breakdown of all operations (start up, page load, etc..)
DTrace support for a POSIX shell (ksh93), Roland Mainz
This project should exploit the way of adding DTrace probes to a POSIX shell (building on top of the already running "OpenSolaris ksh93-integration project"), allowing to monitor activities in a shell script (like command execution, entering/exiting shell functions, subshell creation/destruction, shell child process creation/destruction, calls of external+builtin commands, getting the lanugage-level stacktrace, trace variable set/get/unset etc.) at shell script language level in a non-invasive way. For example, monitor activities in already running scripts without altering their behaviour - the "normal" way of tracing in a POSIX shell slightly alters the script's behaviour and requires to restart the script for each tracing/debugging session.
Human Computer Interaction
Camera based HCI System, Emily Chen
A camera based human computer interaction (HCI) system can recognize gestures made by the user by analyzing the video image stream from the camera, like this example. These gestures can then be mapped into actions, enabling the user to interact with a computer without a keyboard or mouse. This tasks involved the development of the HCI method above, that could be used as an assistive technology in the accessibility field. This may have the following functionality -
- Use color detection to simulate head-tracker
- Use motion detection to implement basic interaction
- Use face detection and tracking to implement the 'Face navigate in 3D environment'
Virtualization
Virtualization and X, Alan Coopersmith
Virtualization is the new hot topic in operating systems, allowing an abstraction of computer resources. While there are many technologies out there, little thought has gone into how you might display applications under OS virtualization schemes - how should your Xen dom0 X server display windows from other Xen domains? This tasks involves basic research into the virtualization techniques available on OpenSolaris, along with some thought and code into how you might show different applications from different domains through use of existing window manager implementations like Metacity and Compiz.
BrandZ on 64-bit x86 Linux
BrandZ is a framework that extends the Solaris Zones infrastructure to create Branded Zones, which are zones that contain non-native operating environments. This task would port the lx brand (Linux) over to support 64-bit applications.
Porting the lx brand to SPARC
Currently, the lx brand is only available for x86 Solaris. However, it would be useful to run SPARC Linux binaries natively on SPARC. While SPARC Linux is not as popular as x86 Linux, SPARC is an interesting architecture that has many advantages, such as low power, high-performance for applications that can take advantage of thread-level parallelism. When the lx brand is available on SPARC, a large number of low-end Linux servers can be consolidated onto a single high-end Niagara server.
FreeBSD branded zone
BrandZ allows support for Linux binary applications to run unmodified on Solaris, within zones running a complete Linux userspace. This task would involve the creation of a new FreeBSD brand providing the same functionality.