FOSS Outreach Program for Women (OPW)

Welcome OPW applicants! The Linux Foundation is sponsoring internships for women and genderqueer/genderfluid people to work on the Linux kernel. The kernel is the most basic layer of the Linux operating system. It encompasses many things: hardware drivers, filesystems, security, task scheduling, and much more.

This is for the 2013 Winter program.

Participating Linux kernel projects

Xen subsystem in Linux

http://blog.xen.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/BeZenHackXenFinal2.png

The Linux kernel interfaces with the Xen hypervisor via hypercalls and also with other kernels by backend and frontend drivers. Xen's architecture allows to seperate each guest completlty and they can communicate amongst each other using backend/frontend drivers. But as any software exists there are bugs and the need to improve, cleanup and in general make it better. And also help in writting documentation on how Linux and Xen interact.

The intern would work on a smörgåsbord of issues the Xen components in the Linux kernel has. The ones that fit within the three month period are concentrated in:

• Making the event channel mechanism capable of fast checkpointing so that Remus (a software approach to lock-step and fail-over working) can properly work.

• Multiple design issues with the block protocol (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vh5T8Z3Tx3sUEhVB0DnNDKBNiqB_ZA8Z5YVqAsCIjuI/edit). Also there are bugs in the code.

• Multiple issues with the net protocol - lack of documentation (designs and internals), performance test and analysis, bug fixes etc.
• Understanding the Xen platform and writing documentation on how it works to be made in an architecture paper (or doing this alongside the other projects and just writing down what has been learned).

Required skills: Knowledge of how to use and manipulate pointers and function pointers in C is a must.

Optional but learnable skills: Knowledge of computer architecture, x86 assembly

Mentors: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk (contact info)