GSoC - Making DragonflyBSD multiboot capable

[Radosław Szymczyszyn]

Hello,

For some time I've been thinking of posting about this topic myself.
Alas, I can't dedicate enough time for a GSoC proposal and that made
me hesitate. Once it's been brought up, however, I have to react.

Please let me introduce myself. I'm a final year MSc programme student
from AGH-UST in Kraków, Poland. Currently, I'm carrying on with my MSc
project based on which I'm to write my thesis. For the project/thesis
topic I've chosen "Making DragonFly Multiboot capable" from the GSoC
proposals list, though I didn't intend to take part in GSoC itself
because of my job - GSoC requires quite a large time commitment
weekly.

I've carried out some part of the project already - my changes to GRUB
regarding the disklabel64 read support are pending for merge because
of the formalities (it's necessary to send a paper agreement via
postal mail to the FSF headquarters to include code into any of their
project). You can find the topic regarding this on the grub-devel
mailing list (e.g.
https://www.google.com/search?q=grub-devel+mailing+list+patch+disklabel64).

I haven't yet announced my idea to this list, since I wanted to have
the GRUB related stuff behind me for that. Furthermore, I have been
gathering sources and reading on FreeBSD/DFly kernel specifics before
making the announcement.

And now it happens that someone, in this case Pedro, announces the
will to take on this project, which makes me uncertain of how to
proceed with my MSc thesis (changing the topic is hardly an option due
to the formalities at the university).

So, without further ado, could you, Pedro, consider changing your GSoC
proposal in the light of the above?

For the DFly people to consider whether I'm suitable for the task
here's a bit more of my background. I'm employed as an Erlang
programmer (working on open source code too). I use Linux, MacOSX and
git daily and have some open source contributions with the GRUB stuff
being the biggest till now. My system/low level/C/assembly programming
experience comes mainly from university courses on Systems Programming
(Unix stuff: memory management, IPC, etc, some toy Linux modules,
custom syscalls, interrupt handlers) and Distributed Programming (MPI
distributed computations in C). For the past couple of months I've
been reading on x86 architecture details, getting to know DFly
codebase and making the contributions to GRUB. I also have a github
account: https://github.com/lavrin/

So, to state my will clearly: I don't intend to participate in GSoC
because of my studies, job and possibly irregular amounts of time I
can contribute weekly, but I'd like to work on making DFly Multiboot
capable and continue with my thesis regarding this endeavour.

Hope this meets with understanding :)

Best regards,
Radek Szymczyszyn

2013/4/22 "Pedro J. Ruiz López" <holzplatten at es.gnu.org>:
> Hello.
>
> My name is Pedro. I am interested in working on DragonflyBSD as a GSoC
> student and the idea of making it multiboot capable is very interesting to
> me.
>
> I have a BSc in Computer Science and I am studying MSc in Computer
> Engineering at University of Malaga (Spain). I use GNU/Linux systems on a
> daily basis and have used FreeBSD for several years. My main contribution to
> free software community is the GCC backend for PIC18 target CPUs. I carried
> out such project as final BSc thesis. I also have been co-maintaining GNU
> Idutils since 2007. Apart from this, I have professional experience
> developing software in C language and know other languages as Perl and
> Bourne shell scripting language.
>
> Am I on time for discussing the work to do and preparing my application?
>
> Regards.