Hello, I have added the following section to the "contributing" section of the wiki. It won't appear immediately, so I'm also posting this on the lists.
Samuel “ ## Small hack entries Here is a list of small hacks, which can serve as entries into the Hurd code for people who would like to dive into the code but just lack a "somewhere to begin with". * Make pfinet OK with the ethernet device going away. This would be a very nice feature: being able to just restart the ethernet driver; we've just not taken the time to fix it yet, but it shouldn't be very hard. The code begins at `hurd/pfinet/ethernet.c`, `ethernet_open()`, the `device_open` call, which produces `edev->ether_port`. Basically, one needs to catch errors like EIEIO when using it, and in that case re-open the device. * Add a futex kernel trap to GNU Mach. This can be useful for nicer locking primitives, including inter-process primitives. `vm_allocate` can be used as an example in the `gnumach` source tree for how to add a kernel trap. https://savannah.gnu.org/task/index.php?6231 * Add a `task_set_name` RPC to GNU Mach. Currently the Mach debugger keeps `arg[0]` from the stack with ugly heuristics (see `gnumach/i386/i386/db_interface.c`, `looks_like_command`...). It would be far better to let `exec` simply set the name and record it in `task_t`. `thread_create` can be used as an example in the `gnumach` source tree for how to add an RPC. glibc needs to be recompiled against the updated mach.defs to get access to it from userland. exec would probably call it from `hurd/exec/exec.c`, `do_exec()`. * Write a partfs translator, to which one gives a disk image, and which exposes the partitions of the disk image, using parted, and the parted-based storeio (`settrans -c foos1 /hurd/storeio -T typed part:1:file:/home/samy/tmp/foo`). This would be libnetfs-based. * Write virtio drivers for KVM. Ideally they would be userland. * Port valgrind. There is a whole [[GSoC proposal|community/gsoc/project_ideas/valgrind ]] about this, but the basic port could be small. * Add a `-E` option to `rpctrace` to specify environment variables: https://savannah.gnu.org/task/index.php?9331 * Use libz and libbz2 in exec. See `hurd/exec/unzip.c` etc., they should be replaced by mere calls to libraries, https://savannah.gnu.org/task/index.php?6990 * Add `/proc/$pid/maps`. `vminfo` already has this kind of information, it's a matter of making procfs do the same. https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?32770 ”
