Re: Google Summer of Code projects for the GNU C Library.

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hi!

On Wed, 19 Feb 2014 19:14:45 -0500, "Carlos O'Donell"  wrote:
> The GNU Project is participating in GSoC 2014 and have asked
> individual GNU projects to nominate their own GSoC projects
> under their umbrella.
> 
> We have proposed an initial three projects for the GNU C Library
> and you can see them here:
> http://www.gnu.org/software/soc-projects/ideas-2014.html
> 
> At present I'm a mentor for glibc and Joseph Myers is a backup
> mentor. However we expect all participation to happen on libc-alpha
> and libc-help and that the community will assist in teaching
> the students how challenging/rewarding it is to work on system
> libraries.
> 
> If anyone has any more project ideas they think a student can
> work on please suggest them here. Keep in mind that the idea
> has to be simple enough for a student to implement in a very
> limited time.
> 
> We might not propose any more, but any ideas we come up with
> I'll put into a GSoC project page and we can draw from there
> next year instead of scrambling like I did today :-)

I have just added »Implement Missing Interfaces for GNU Hurd«,
:

| == Implement Missing Interfaces for GNU Hurd ==
| 
| In glibc's Linux kernel port, most simple POSIX interfaces are in fact just 
forwarded to (implemented by) Linux kernel system calls.
| In contrast, in the [[http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/glibc.html|GNU Hurd 
port]], the POSIX (and other) interfaces are actually implemented in glibc on 
top of the [[http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/rpc.html|Hurd RPC 
protocols]].
| A few examples:
| 
[[https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=sysdeps/mach/hurd/getuid.c|getuid]],
| 
[[https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=sysdeps/mach/hurd/open.c|open]],
| 
[[https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=sysdeps/mach/hurd/rmdir.c|rmdir]],
| 
[[https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=sysdeps/mach/hurd/setresuid.c|setresuid]],
| 
[[https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=sysdeps/mach/hurd/socketpair.c|socketpair]].
| 
| When new interfaces are added to glibc (new editions of POSIX and similar 
standards, support for new editions of C/C++ standards, new GNU-specific 
extensions), generally 
[[https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=posix/execve.c|ENOSYS 
stubs]] are added, which are then used as long as there is no real 
implementation, and often these real implementations are only done for the 
Linux kernel port, but not GNU Hurd.
| (This is because most of the contributors are primarily interested in using 
glibc on Linux-based systems.)
| Also, there is quite a backlog of 
[[http://darnassus.sceen.net/~hurd-web/open_issues/glibc/#missing|missing 
implementations]] for GNU Hurd.
| 
| In coordination with the [[mailto:bug-hurd@gnu.org|GNU Hurd developers]], 
you'd work on implementing such missing interfaces.

Please review/edit/amend/polish this (please shout if you need to be
added to ), and then I'll
soon ask José to also include it on
 as well as put
it on/link to it from
.


Grüße,
 Thomas


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coulomb

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hi!

It is with sadness that I have to report the demise of coulomb, the
system powered by an AMD Athlon XP with 1466 MHz, that has long been
serving my GNU Hurd development needs.  In the night from Tuesday to
Wednesday, working on tracking down the

issue, its venerable K7VTA3 2.0a mainboard, about as old as the current
millennium, now appears to have bought the farm, and resists to be
revived, having tried with three different ATX power supplies.

Of course, this system was long obsolete, but opposed to a solution based
on a virtual machine, it had the advantage that it had a well-defined
timing behavior, so I used it to track that we don't get whole-system
performance regressions when performing certain tasks, such as building
GCC, by just measuring wall time.  As it was based on real hardware, it
allowed for simply plugging in stuff, and see whether that works.  Alas,
this era now seems to be over, and I'll be moving the little development
that I do into a virtual machine; Xen can measure whole-system domU CPU
usage, I think -- not sure about KVM.


Grüße,
 Thomas


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