Summer coding ideas for 2016

Open For Ideas! - This page contains some ideas from last year. This does not mean that they are valid for this year too. We are in the process of cleaning up the page.

Find an idea you like? Want to propose your own? See the GSoC Getting Started Guide.

Students Welcome

If you are a student looking forward to participate the GSoC 2016 with Fedora, please feel free to browse the idea list which is still growing. Do not hesitate to contact the mentors or contributors as indicated in this page for any related clarification. You also should find some like-minded people on the #fedora-summer-coding IRC channel.

If you are new to the Fedora Project, the following material will help you to get started. Additionally, please register in the Fedora Account System (FAS) if you are willing to continue with the Fedora Project. For getting quick help, #fedora-devel can be used for getting help with programming problems.

1. The Four Foundations of Fedora
2. Official GSoC Resources
3. Fedora Documentation
4. IRC
5. Development

Supporting Mentors

The following contributors are available to provide general help and support for the GSoC 2016 program (existing contributors, feel free to add yourselves and your wiki page). If a specific project mentor is busy, you can contact one of the people below for short-term help on your project or task.

1. Remy DeCausemaker
2. Kushal Das
3. Haïkel Guémar
4. Josh Berkus
5. Luke Macken

Fedora Atomic Mentors

The following mentors are specifically available for projects related to Fedora Atomic:

1. Giuseppe Scriviano
2. Colin Walters
3. Matthew Barnes

Idea list for GSoC 2016

Implement Tinykdump

Status: Proposed - draft

Summary of idea: Tinykdump is a minimal daemon to capture kernel-based crash dumping (kdump) memory image to usb storage. Compared to the traditional kdump solution, it is,

* more reliable and scalable
* has smaller memory foot-print
* more friendly to kernel developers 

More information here: https://fedorahosted.org/tinykdump/

Knowledge prerequisite: Python, kernel programming (desired)

Skill level: intermediate (programming)

Contacts: CAI Qian

Mentor(s): CAI Qian

Notes: Rough roadmap:

• Implement tinykdump daemon to be included in Fedora.
• Submit kernel patches for reserving kdump memory at run-time for community review and inclusion.
• Currently, pstore only log kernel messages for panic and Oops. Patches are needed to support logging of kdump kernel and initramfs console output.

Idea list for Fedora Atomic GSoC 2016

This idea list comes from the Project Atomic website. The most up-to-date version is there.

• Bootstrap with gpgcheck in kickstart: Add a way for importing a GPG key from the kickstart ostreesetup command before the download starts. "ostreesetup" is described here

• Improve ability to monitor running/canceled transactions: The rpm-ostree client termination doesn't block the command execution on the rpm-ostreed. This will cause new rpm-ostree clients to fail immediately because there is a transaction in progress. Change rpm-ostree to be notified of the status of the current transaction and possibly attach to it.

• Support for end-of-life notification: Add support for having an end-of-life notification to inform users if a particular branch is not supported anymore.

• rpm-ostree operation history support: Add support for atomic history to display the transactions history. It should work in a similar way to yum history.

• Automatic updates: Implement a service that automatically upgrades the system when a new image is available. If the system is not restarting correctly, then rolblack to the previous working version. More details here:

• Support metalink for OSTree: Add support for metalink files and support downloads from a list of mirrors and fetch objects from multiple sources.

• Drop privileges for HTTP fetches: The HTTP fetcher code is running in the same process of OSTree. Move the HTTP fetcher code to another process with less privileges than the main process.

• Support kpatch: Support live update for the kernel without rebooting or restarting any processes.

Open Ideas From GSoC 2015

In addition to the above list of ideas, you may want to check out ideas from previous years and contact the mentors for those projects to see if they're still interested in mentoring someone this year.

Previous years:

• 2015
• 2014
• 2013
• 2012
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009
• 2008

Note: Do not submit a proposal for an idea from a previous year without contacting the mentor to ensure they will be available to mentor you. Without a mentor, proposals will be rejected.