Inter­est­ing projects in the GSoC

I count­ed 18 projects which are giv­en to FreeB­SD in this years GSoC. For 3 of them I have some comments.

Very inter­est­ing to me is the project which is named Col­lec­tive lim­its on set of process­es (a.k.a. jobs). This looks a bit like the Solaris contract/project IDs. If this project results in some­thing which allows the user­land to query which PID belongs to which set, than this allows some nice improve­ment for start scripts. For exam­ple at work on Solaris each appli­ca­tion is a mix of sev­er­al projects (apache = “name:web” project, tom­cat = “name:app” project, Ora­cle DB = “name:ora” project). Our man­age­ment frame­work (writ­ten by a co-worker) allows to eas­i­ly do some­thing with those projects, a “show” dis­plays the prstat (sim­i­lar to top) info just for process­es which belong to the project, a “kill” sends a kill-signal to all process­es of the project, and so on. We could do some­thing sim­i­lar with our start scripts by declar­ing a name­space (FreeBSD:base:XXX / FreeBSD:ports:XXX?) and maybe num­ber space (depend­ing on the imple­men­ta­tion) as reserved and use it to see if process­es which belong to a par­tic­u­lar script are still run­ning or kill them or whatever.

The oth­er two projects I want to com­ment upon here are Com­plete libp­kg and cre­ate new pkg tools and Com­plete Pack­age sup­port in the pkg_install tools and cleanup. Both projects ref­er­ence libp­kg in their descrip­tion. I hope the men­tors of both projects pay some atten­tion to what is going on in the oth­er project to not cause dependencies/clashes between the students.

That I do not men­tion oth­er projects does not mean that they are not inter­est­ing or sim­i­lar, it is just that I do not have to say some­thing valu­able about them…