DragonFly Projects
This page shall serve as a common place to look if you're in search of a DragonFly related project. It's also the place to check if someone else is already working on it (to prevent project collision) or should be contacted.
Website projects
Correct mailing lists page and news page to better describe the content of each list.
Create layout for http://bugs.dragonflybsd.org that matches the main site.
Check through all the DragonFly mirrors and report on any that aren't working
Create short list of tasks for a new DragonFly user (this information is all available elsewhere, but it's buried in a lot of other data):
- how to upgrade the operating system
- how to get to a working desktop
- and where and how to report issues.
Documentation projects
- Check all chapters of the handbook and do the following:
Check if the content applies to DragonFly. If not, change it.
- Add new content and enhance the previous chapters
- Check for syntax error, typos and wiki errors.
- Add prev/next buttons to all pages.
Reorder /usr/src/UPDATING to put more relevant information at top; remove data no longer relevant.
Help out in http://bugs.dragonflybsd.org (try to reproduce, diagnose, propose fixes ...)
- Organize, contribute to, and finish the C book project.
Userland projects
Bring in BSD-licensed versions of some text tools like grep, diff and sort. The OpenBSD guys already did some work related to that. If you manage to bring the tools to DragonFly, check if everything works as expected (e.g. rc.d scripts, make world runs, ...). Of course the new tools need to have at least all the features of the old GNU tools.
Update the contributed software which is out-of-date.
Remove NOINET6 build option
WARN corrections to utilities
Clean our code to make it style(9) compatible. Compile and test your changes. Verify that the checksum (sha(1)) of the unmodified object matches the checksum of the cleaned object. Check also with strip(1)+sha(1)
- Bring in code from other *BSDs:
- smbfs changes from FreeBSD
- pf changes from OpenBSD
Randomize mmap() offsets as described in http://www.openbsd.org/papers/ven05-deraadt/index.html
Add extended slice support to fdisk
- Install Coverity and fix the FreeBSD bugs that were uncovered by Coverity, but do not just blindly pull over the FreeBSD patches. Make sure that you first understand what the patch does.
C99 Standards Conformance. The todo list is on http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/index.cgi/StandardsConformanceProject (original http://www.in-nomine.org/~asmodai/df/conformance/).
- Setup a regression testing machine/system to register and find problems and new improvements..
- Networking performance scalability
scalability (algorithmic performance) - ideas: http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/ and http://bulk.fefe.de/lk2006/talk.pdf
also check HowToStressTest
- Add lwp support to ptrace/gdb/core dumps.
Linuxulator update (FreeBSD did a lot of work in this area. Look here,
- Bringing in version 2.0 of the BSD Installer
Build a Live CD with a DragonFly-specific X desktop, integrated into nrelease build. Check ongoing LiveDVD project: LiveDVD for Google SoC
- UTF8 support in the console
Write a tool to monitor changes in other code bases such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD. corecode is busy with this one (http://oly.corecode.ath.cx/~corecode/cgi-bin/crosscgi.py) (svn repository (https://fortunaty.net/svn/crossref/)).
- Work relating GDB:
- ptrace/gdb follow-fork-mode support and more (peek at linux)
- Change the build to create one libbfd for gdb and binutils
- Separate RPC code from NFS into separate library.
Kernel projects
- Make our sound system support surround sound
Port the BSDL OSS code to DragonFly
- Complete Path MTU Discovery by adding a host route to remember the Path MTU and setting a timer to expire old host routes. See netinet/if_ether.c for an example of this mechanism as used by ARP. Periodically increase MTU of hosts that have had its MTU decreased.
- Look for places in the kernel that can benefit from Solaris-style caching of preconstructed slab allocator objects. If we can find enough of these uses, we can add this functionality to the kernel memory allocator.
Implement sem_open(), sem_close(), and sem_unlink().
Clean our code to make it style(9) compatible. Compile and test your changes. Verify that the checksum (sha(1)) of the unmodified object matches the checksum of the cleaned object. Check also with strip(1)+sha(1)
- Setup a regression testing machine/system to register and find problems and new improvements..
- Networking performance scalability
scalability (algorithmic performance) - ideas: http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/ and http://bulk.fefe.de/lk2006/talk.pdf
also check HowToStressTest
fix APIC_IO on SMP
- Port drivers from other systems. (Being able to support most of the wireless adapters out there would be nice.)
Port TMPFS. Look here for the work the FreeBSD guys did.
Port ZFS. Look here for the work the FreeBSD guys did.
Port NFSv4. This mail is a good starting point.
- Port/sync the following from FreeBSD:
- PCI code (to take advantage of power saving features)
- cpufreq and powerd
- netgraph modules. Contact joerg.
- Bring in support for UFS2, just the changes to extend the width of some fields from 32 bits to 64 bits.
- hardware drivers.
- Port/sync the following from OpenBSD:
Add support for the NoExecute bit as described in http://www.openbsd.org/papers/auug04/index.html.
- After that, make user stacks and data heaps non-executable. (W^X)
- hardware drivers, specially wireless.
Import/Update DRM from the DRM git repository (http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DRM).
- CPU scheduler work:
Design & implement a run-time switchable scheduler framework. (see Luigi's FreeBSD4 scheduler framework at http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ps_sched.20020719a.diff)
- The next step is to add a Solaris-like dispatcher framework that can handle more than one installed scheduling policy, all running on top of the base fixed lwkt priorities.
- I/O scheduler work:
- factor out, and make the IO scheduler plugabble.
- start with a "NOP" scheduler for RAM based devices
- implement a anticipatory scheduler (see documentation about the linux anticipatory scheduller)
- implement a Fair Queuing scheduler (even out the access to IO between competing processes/users)
Work relating LWKT (LightWeightKernelThreading)
- Implement lazy IPI cross-processor lwkt message passing.
- Add timeout functionality to lwkt_waitmsg().
- Write man pages for the lwkt message passing API.
- A real slab allocator. Contact corecode for patches.
- clean up buildworld/kernel compilation warnings
- Make the kernel more robust. Do this by removing any cases causing a kernel panic on memory allocation failure. Contact Devon H. O'Dell for information and ideas about how this might work.
- Port XFS. (Contact joerg)
- Computer Architecture related:
Port DragonFly over to Xen.
Port DragonFly over to amd64 (look here for more information).
- Port DTrace
- Capriccio threads
- Xen support as domU and dom0 platform
SimonsTODOs contain some more or less important things of various sizes and colors