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Two FreeBSD Summer of Code projects

FreeBSD has 17 Google Summer of Code projects this year and most of them look very interesting! As I am involved as a mentor or co-mentor in two of those, I would like to describe them here.

Keywords: FreeBSD, Summer of Code

First of these is the port (or reimplementation) of the BFS scheduler from Linux, and it's blogged about in detail here. It is a very experimental project which aims to find out if having a scheduler with very simplistic decision making can yield better results than those of the currently "normal" somewhat complex schedulers like ULE and 4BSD. The BFS scheduler is originally implemented in Linux with some interesting ideas behind it. The results it achieves are very good on certain benchmarks and I am very curious to see how its principles will fare on FreeBSD. The scheduler is under active development, but hopefully the FreeBSD port will bring in the latest features.

The second project is to finish the port of FUSE to FreeBSD. FUSE is the very useful userland file system layer which also originated on Linux, which would add many convenient file systems to FreeBSD. Among others, there are sshfs and ntfs3g which would make life easier for many users. The original FUSE port was also done as a GSoC project some years ago and this year we will hopefully finish it.

I think these projects will add some real new high-profile features to FreeBSD!

Posted on 2011-05-24T15:18 by ivoras

#1 Re: Two FreeBSD Summer of Code projects

Added on 2011-05-25T00:09 by killasmurf86

Hopefully after "fixing" (porting) FUSE, TrueCrypt will work(tm) on FreeBSD. This would be very, very good as many users on FreeBSD forum ask for it

#2 Re: Two FreeBSD Summer of Code projects

Added on 2011-05-25T00:38 by mwisnicki

TrueCrypt uses FUSE to export unencrypted disk image that is then attached to md(4). It would be much simplier to replace it all with geom_gate.

#3 Re: Two FreeBSD Summer of Code projects

Added on 2011-05-25T01:15 by Ivan Voras

Yes, TrueCrypt is perfect for geom_gate... it's been on my todo list for a while :(

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