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The following project ideas can be submitted to the MirOS Project by everybody who feels like having the necessary skills. To avoid duplicate work, we suggest the applicant to contact us at the miros-discuss public mailing list first.
Submissions ought to be made under the MirOS Licence, but any other licence which is equivalent to the UCB/BSD licence is OK. We suggest to not add advertising clauses, though.
List of ideas
Fix annoying bugs in nroff, especially these which prevent it from outputting correctly formatted manual pages when not built with -O1 or -fno-omit-frame-pointer on gcc 3.4-stable snapshots (even on Debian). If the code is also cleaned up a bit, chances are it will make into stock OpenBSD at least for plain nroff support. Also, ask Brian Kerninghan for a licence for ditroff, start hacking on it instead (tg@ has got the sources, they just lack a licence and copyright marker).
The first bug you should look at is even exposed when using -O1:
The options that operate on the names of files or archive members (-c,-i, -n, -s, -u, -v, -D, -G, -T, -U, -Y, and -Z) interact as follows.in the pax(1) manual page, instead of (hand-edited)
The options that operate on the names of files or archive members (-c, -i, -n, -s, -u, -v, -D, -G, -T, -U, -Y, and -Z) interact as follows.or, depending on the line length,
The options that operate on the names of files or archive members (-c, -i, -n, -s, -u, -v, -D, -G, -T, -U, -Y, and -Z) interact as follows.This is .Po and .Pc, all others (.Qo/.Qc and so on) are broken the same way, and it gets worse if you build nroff with -O2/-Os instead of -O1 (-funit-at-a-time also exhibits the bug, but this time I'm convinced it's a bug in nroff).
(from an eMail)
Estimated effort: Time - medium; Skill - low
Port MirOS BSD to the Xen machine virtualisation technique. This can probably be done by looking at the NetBSD code and giving credit where due. Domain U and Xen 2.0 support is a must; Domain 0 support would be an additional bonus.
We would like to not need src/sys/arch/xen, rather keep it integrated in src/sys/arch/i386, except for the Xen-specific device drivers, which can go to src/sys/arch/i386/xen/ (DomU drivers).
Estimated effort: Time - high; Skill - medium
Port FFS snapshots support to MirOS BSD. In addition to that, port at least one of UBC (unified buffer cache) or UFS2 support. Again, this can be made quite easily by looking at how NetBSD has done it; in addition, Ted Unangst of OpenBSD has published some experimental diffs to the OpenBSD mailing lists.
Estimated effort: Time - medium; Skill - medium (high if UBC)
Add support for IPv4 mapped IPv6 addresses to MirOS BSD, controllable with a sysctl (net.inet6.ip6.v6only), so that, if the sysctl is set to 0, a daemon listening on (say) [::]:53 will receive IPv4-transport (on the wire) packets as IPv6-mapped (in the protocol stack) connections and is able to process them without having to listen to [0.0.0.0]:53 as well. Keep care that these IPv4-mapped IPv6 packets are never seen on the wire, and that IPv4-mapped packets seen on the wire are always discarded, for security reasons.
Estimated effort: Time - medium; Skill - medium
Communicate with upstream and send back diffs. This is urgent for XFree86®, high priority for GNU binutils; low priority for all other stuff (probably not interesting for gcc at all). The project assignee will have to make himself familiar with the MirOS-local diffs first – not always an easy task because we inherited a lot of them from OpenBSD. (Optionally, add support for cross-building to OpenBSD targets first.)
Estimated effort: Time - medium to high; Skill - low but specialised
Merge improvements from NetBSD® – especially in the following fields: make(1); binutils and gcc (so we can cross-build to all or almost all NetBSD® targets); ...
Estimated effort: Time - medium to high; Skill - medium
Remove Perl dependency from the MirPorts Framework – allows e.g. MidnightBSD users to use MirPorts without having to install Perl from mports first. Simplifies maintenance, as developers don’t have to learn Perl. (Possibly add a lang/perl5 port though, to depend on it.) Replace “perl -pi -e "s/foo/bar/g" …” invocations in Makefiles by “print ',g/foo/s//bar/g\nwq' | ed -s …”.
Estimated effort: Time – low; Skill – low + Perl knowledge
Implementation notes
Unless we are accepted as a mentoring organisation at Google's "Summer of Code" we are sorry we cannot offer a bounty for completion of these tasks. We are trying, though.
People working on the above projects will be listed there so you can contact them if required.
