SoC: My project proposal

In yesterday's post, I mentioned that I applied for Google's Summer of Code — a program designed to introduce students to the world of open source software development — and I realized I had not blogged anything about it yet.

Despite I'm already in the open source software development world, I thought this was a good opportunity to learn new stuff and, why not, earn some money doing something I like. So I looked for a project and sent a proposal.

My project aims to develop an efficient, memory-based file-system for NetBSD. I can agree that this is not very innovative because we already have mfs, but it is still a good project. First of all, mfs is flawed, as it's just ffs over memory pages; this means that it uses lots of data structures and algorithms designed for on-disk data when they'd be simply avoided. Think about superblocks, superblock copies, smart placement of data blocks, etc. It also has some problems as regards memory consumption, as some developers told me.

On the other hand, this project is nice because I'll seize the opportunity to write some documentation about the VFS layer, something that'll benefit other developers who may want to get involved in this area (just as I'll be doing). Furthermore, I think it's correctly sized for a two-month project, given that I'll be working on it full-time.

So... let's hope I get picked! :) But if not, I think I'll work on this idea anyway, although not as intensively as I'd otherwise.