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List:       freebsd-hackers
Subject:    GSoC project: Make optional kernel subsystems register themselves
From:       Ilya Bakulin <webmaster () kibab ! com>
Date:       2010-04-28 21:01:24
Message-ID: 20100429010124.3496d7ef () kibab ! com
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Hi list,
I participate in GSoC this summer, so I want to announce my project.  Project details \
may be found at FreeBSD wiki, [1]. Completing this project will make it easy to get \
current kernel feature set from the userland, thus simplifying writing system \
administration scripts, autoconfigurating Ports, jailed packages building jobs, etc. \
My experience with FreeBSD includes using it as the main OS for both servers and work \
PCs. This includes solving problems with buggy ACPI, helping some FreeBSD developers \
to test their code on my hardware, tuning our company's FreeBSD servers. I maintain \
several ports in FreeBSD Ports Collection. Also I was working with FreeBSD/ARM for \
some time (this includes developing custom firmware for the proprietary \
AT91RM9200-based device, done together with Stanislav Sedov, and driver code for \
Marvell 88F5182 SATA controller -- work done for Semihalf. It was committed to \
FreeBSD-CURRENT last summer).  
According to suggested timeline described at [1], now it's time to decide what kernel \
subsystems need to be registered this way, and how this registration may be \
overriden. The interesting question is: should modules register themselves under \
kern.features tree? For example, USB support may be either compiled into kernel or \
loaded as a module at runtime. In the first case it seems to be a good idea to \
register it under kern.features. The main goal is not to rely on "kldstat -v" to get \
compiled-in modules. Other need-to-be-registered things are ALTQ support, MAC \
support, INET/INET6,... I expect all such sysctls to be boolean: the feature X is \
either present, in this case "kern.features.X = 1", or not present -- simply no node \
at kernel.features. But maybe it's not sufficient?  

So I'll be glad to hear your opinion, and hope we all will be able to set \
"kern.features.the_best_os_ever=1" in our kernel feature sets at the end of the \
summer :-) Good luck for all GSoC participants!

[1] http://wiki.freebsd.org/SOC2010IlyaBakulin

-- 
Regards,
Ilya Bakulin
http://kibab.com
xmpp://kibab612@jabber.ru


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