A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Murray Stokely very kindly passed me a link to his summary of the 8 videos now online showing presentations from the recent 2009 DCBSDCon.
Of particular interest is Robert Luciani’s talk about M:N threading in DragonFly. Yes, that’s the same Robert Luciani who is participating in Summer of Code with DragonFly to profile kernel contention on multiprocessor systems.
There’s 5 slots for DragonFly in Summer of Code for 2009, and the students in those slots are listed below. We had some very good applications; more than we had room for and higher quality than last year. If you did not get in, please consider working independently.
Student: Alexander Hornung
Project: DevFS for DragonFly BSD
Mentor: joe talbott
Student: Dan Chis
Project: Support debugging of multi-threaded applications
Mentor: schubert simon
Student: robert luciani
Project: Profile kernel contention on MP systems
Mentor: Samuel Greear
Student: Jordan Gordeev
Project: Finish amd64 port of DragonFly
Mentor: Matthew Dillon
Student: efstathios kamperis
Project: C99/POSIX Conformance Audit
Mentor: hasso tepper
Student projects for Google Summer of Code will be announced this Monday, for DragonFly, and for all other participating organizations. DragonFly has 5 slots, and more than 5 excellent proposals, which is a good kind of problem to have. We’ll see what we can fit.
If you’re a student with a Summer of Code application, make sure to subscribe to it. Doing this will ensure you are automatically notified of any mentor requests for more information.
There’s also some recent stats published by Google on the applications so far; DragonFly is one of the surveyed orgs it mentions, and the results are the same – less applications, better quality.
The due date for the Summer of Code proposals is past, and DragonFly has 18 proposals. The consensus from other SoC organizations is the same: less applicants everywhere this year, but the proposal quality is up.
Potential mentors can now discuss the proposals and ask for more detail from the students, until April 15th.
19:00 UTC today is the deadline for all student applications for Google’s Summer of Code program. You can revise applications up to April 15th based on feedback, but the initial proposal has to be in the system as of tonight. That’s 5 hours from now, if I have my time calculations correct.
DragonFly has 15 applications at this point, and general application quality looks to be better this year than last.
If you’re a potential student for Google’s Summer of Code, please get your application in ASAP. All student applications are due by 19:00 UTC April 3rd. You can revise a submitted application, even after the April 3rd cutoff, but it has to be in.
If you’re a student, you have from now until the 3rd of April to apply for a Summer of Code slot.
There is, of course, DragonFly project ideas for Google’s Summer of Code. There are also idea pages up for FreeBSD and NetBSD, both also participating this year.
If you’d like to mentor for DragonFly, as several people have expressed interest, sign yourself up at the Summer of Code site and request mentoring for DragonFly. If you sign up before the 23rd, when students can start applying, you’ll get added to the private mentors mailing list.
DragonFly BSD is a participating organization in Google’s Summer of Code 2009. (See the lists of participating organizations at the Google site.)
I have an announcement message with more details on the mailing lists; the next important date is the 23rd, when students can apply. If you’re a student, start putting your proposal together and talking with others. If you can mentor, sign yourself up on the Google site and request a mentoring spot.
I just finished the application for DragonFly to participate in Summer of Code 2009:
http://socghop.appspot.com/org_app/show/google/gsoc2009/dragonflybsd
We did well last year, so I’m hoping we will get in again. Check the website for this year’s details.
If you are interested in the Google Summer of Code project, as a student, a mentor, or just want to suggest a project, write that down:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/gsoc2009/
The application period starts for DragonFly (for the organization, not students) in a week, and it’ll help to see who wants to get in on the action.
If you can see YouTube, you can see a 20-minute presentation from a Philip Johnson about his experiences from Google Summer of Code 2008, where he was a mentor for another project. If you aren’t familiar with the Summer of Code project, or think that you might participate as a student, this is a good introduction to the concept.
The wiki from Summer of Code 2008 has been opened up to the world and is being treated as a general resource for mentors and students, so please consult it if you are thing of being either one of those things.
Also, a FAQ for the 2009 session is together. Applications start in March, so get yourself together…
Update: Dates mentioned here, by me.