Danny Robson wrote: > I've been talking to a lecturer who takes a 'course' which basically > consists of a student picking a suitably difficult project to undertake > for the usual 3 months or so of semester. > > He was interested in seeing if there might be some potential OpenSolaris > projects to suggest to his students. I have a couple of ideas, but I was > wondering if anyone here had some suggestions for projects?
There's some ideas from the Google Summer of Code & OpenSolaris Innovation contests at: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/awards/awards_land/awards_ideas/ http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/summerofcode/projects/ Some other ideas I remember from other discussions recently (admitedly, some of these would be projects best suited for teams or longer than a semester, but as long as I'm making the list I included them in case someone comes looking for bigger projects too - and you could probably pick a reasonable subset to do as a single person/semester project): - Take the file manager from GNOME or KDE and enhance it to feature the advanced features of ZFS and/or the new Solaris CIFS server/client - ACL's, viewing pools/volumes, extended attributes, Active Directory ID mapping, CIFS system attributes, etc. Support for mounting .iso's with lofiadm would also be cool. - Now that Solaris has notification of file changes, look at existing daemons like cron, sendmail, etc. and figure out which should monitor files for changes instead of waiting for kill -HUP, and which should wait for a system admin to notify it that their configuration changes are complete and should be made active. Should probably discuss with admins on sysadmin-discuss & similar forums. - Are there things in OpenSolaris that could make it a better host for or guest in VirtualBox? Could VirtualBox take advantage of OpenSolaris features better - for instance, using ZFS to clone instances and snapshot them more efficiently? - Microsoft just released huge amounts of protocol specs for open source developers - are there any of those that should be implemented in OpenSolaris? - Suspend-to-RAM for x86 was recently integrated, but many drivers need to be updated to support it - update some, or in the case of video drivers, write one. (Currently on x86, we only have user space drivers for most graphics cards, but suspend-and-resume requires a kernel driver be written.) You'll have to figure out all the state that needs to be saved in each and how to restore that state when power is restored. - Write a RSS feed provider that reports on various bits of OS state, so you can subscribe to a syslog feed or FMA fault feed for each machine for instance - figure out what things it would be useful to provide in RSS format. - Find an interesting way to integrate RSS feeds and/or social networking sites with the desktop - being able to view a Flickr feed in your "My Pictures" folder or the GNOME Image Viewer for instance. - Linux platforms are moving more of the x86 graphics driver into the kernel, modesetting, suspend-and-resume support (see above), etc. - write similar drivers for OpenSolaris. - One constant challenge of scripting is that the output formats aren't always easy to parse, and change as features change - what if commands like df, ps, ls, etc. had an option to output in XML format, and there were commands to process that output like an xml grep tool? - Design & implement a GSSAPI replacement for the old Kerberos5 authentication protocol in X (see http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6666747 ). - Implement multi-level Trusted Extensions desktop support in KDE, Compiz, XFCE, or whatever desktop, similar to what's already been done in JDS & CDE. (Probably need to split this into smaller chunks if doing by yourself in a single semester.) - Bluetooth stack and simple sample driver (mouse or keyboard maybe). -- -Alan Coopersmith- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
