Google Summer of Code 2015

Introduction

KolibriOS is going to apply as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2015. This page contains our ideas list and some additional information for students and mentors.

We have previously participated as a Mentoring Organization in Google Summer of Code 2014. The ideas page for 2014 is available for your reference. Our organization page for GSoC 2014 and successfully completed projects for that year can be accessed via this link.

In 2013, we have run an independent Summer of Code using money we collected with Kickstarter. Two students have worked on KolibriOS, and the results of 2013 Summer of Code were: adding write support for EXT2 filesystem, and adding (read-only) support for XFS filesystem.

Student Requirements

Prospective students are required to register on our developers forum, join the developers chat and submit a small bugfix / improvement to our SVN in order for their application to be considered. Examples of such tasks can be obtained by asking on developers chat or on our IRC channel (#kolibrios @ irc.freenode.net). This requirement is only to show us that you are able to work with our SVN and interact with our developers if you are selected. This task has to be completed before student application deadline (27 March 19:00 UTC).

In addition, students need to answer the following questions when applying:

1. Full Name (First + Last Name).
2. E-mail address.
3. Phone (home or mobile) - to be used only for emergency cases.
4. Nickname you plan to use on our forums, SVN repository or IRC chat.
5. Age.
6. Country + city of residence.
7. Human languages you speak (state all languages and knowledge level - basic/intermediate/expert/mother tongue).
8. Name of college or university you are accepted into or enrolled in + link to their website.
9. Name of program (or faculty, or department) in that college/university you are accepted into or enrolled in.
10. Your current timezone in UTC/GMT terms (for example, Paris is UTC/GMT +1 hours right now).
11. Have you been involved with any open-source project in the past? If yes, which one, and what have you done for that project?
12. Code samples - please provide links to code that you have written. It can be your high school project, contribution to open-source organization, your college/university task or anything like that.
13. The task you are willing to work on from our list of Summer of Code 2015 ideas (or suggest your own idea, if you don't like any of the proposed ideas). Please provide an approximate work plan for your task split to 1-week intervals, as well as expected outcome of your work. This point should be detailed as much as possible, as your application would be evaluated mainly based on what you write here. You are welcome (and even encouraged!) to collaborate with potential mentors on this paragraph.
14. What other time commitments, such as school work, university studies, another job, planned vacation, etc., will you have between May 25 and August 21 (coding period)? Please be as specific as possible. Bear in mind that GSoC is like a full-time job, so if you consider taking a summer semester at the university (with more than 1-2 courses), or intend to perform an internship or work elsewhere during the summer in addition to GSoC, you will likely be NOT accepted.

Organization

You can find the organizers on the IRC channel (#kolibrios @ irc.freenode.net) or at our forum: http://board.kolibrios.org/

Name	Nickname	Role
Yogev Ezra	yogev_ezra	Organization Administrator
Jeffrey Amelynck	hidnplayr	Mentor, Backup Administrator
Ivan Baravy	dunkaist	Mentor
Sergey Sakhno	punk_joker	Mentor

We have discussed "Google Summer of Code 2015" application with all active members of the KolibriOS Project Team, and selected only those 3 (three) people who have both the knowledge, the dedication, and the time to help their students during the entire summer. Each one of them was assigned to mentor projects in his area of specialization only. In a rare event when a Mentor from the above list cannot continue mentoring his student(s) due to personal circumstances, we will try to find a replacement Mentor, or ask the remaining Mentors to cover for the missing one. Additionally, there is always a number of knowledgeable members of our team hanging around our forum chat, and they will gladly answer any student questions that may arise, even if they haven't volunteered as Mentors themselves.

Ideas for Google Summer of Code 2015

The below list contains ideas suggested by KolibriOS team members. It is neither complete nor final.
Students are welcome (and even encouraged) to suggest their own ideas for GSoC, provided they can find a mentor amongst KolibriOS developers to guide them.

Sortable list of ideas for easy navigation

How to define your level on a specific topic?

• Beginner: No knowledge at all of the topic,
• Basic: A very basic knowledge of the topic but no professional usage,
• Intermediate: A basic knowledge of the topic but no regular professional usage,
• Advanced: A good knowledge of the topic and a regular professional usage,
• Expert: a perfect knowledge of the topic and a daily professional usage.

Legend of project importance of the task

• Low: For sure it doesn't hurt to implement, but if nobody does it, no one will even notice.
• Medium: Nice-to-have feature.
• High: This feature is needed for the project to start being adopted by masses.
• Critical: This functionality is vital for the project to become useful.

Idea Name	Area	Required Skill Level	Importance for the project	Programming Language	Mentor
XDXF dictionary	Application	intermediate	Standard	Assembler/FASM	dunkaist
CPUID tool	Application	intermediate	Standard	Assembler/FASM	dunkaist
FTP client	Application	intermediate	Standard	Assembler/FASM	dunkaist
Torrent client	Application	intermediate	High	Assembler/FASM	dunkaist
XMPP/Jabber client	Application	intermediate	Standard	Assembler/FASM	dunkaist
Music player	Application	intermediate	Standard	Assembler/FASM	dunkaist
Web browser: WebView	Application	intermediate	Standard	Assembler/FASM	dunkaist
Ethernet driver(s)	Driver	intermediate	Standard	Assembler/FASM	hidnplayr
SD Host Controller driver	Driver	intermediate	Standard	Assembler/FASM	dunkaist
USB device drivers	Driver	intermediate	Standard	Assembler/FASM	dunkaist
Filesystem support	Driver	intermediate	Standard	Assembler/FASM	dunkaist
Unicode support	System wide task	intermediate	Critical	Assembler/FASM	dunkaist
Widget toolkit	System wide task	intermediate	Standard	Assembler/FASM	dunkaist

Applications

These are userspace tasks. They often require only basic knowledge of algorithms and data structures.
No specific experience is required but welcome.

XDXF dictionary

Summary: Write dictionary application with support of XDXF (XML Dictionary eXchange Format)

Details:

• Primary goal: Write library and corresponding dictionary application
• Additional goal: Support of other dictioinary formats
• Language: Assembler/FASM
• Skill level: intermediate
• Importance: Standard
• Mentor: dunkaist
• Links: fasm xml library, XDXF format

CPUID tool

Summary: Update existing CPUID application to be aware of new CPUs and their features

Details:

• Primary goal: Write code to detect and report new CPUs and features
• Additional goal: Refactor code as to use system libraries (libimg, box_lib, etc.)
• Language: Assembler/FASM
• Skill level: beginner/intermediate
• Importance: Standard
• Mentor: dunkaist
• Links: CPUID program, Intel cpuid, AMD cpuid

FTP client

Summary: Create a GUI based FTP client or add FTP support to one of the existing file managers

Details:

• Primary goal: FTP access (download/upload/etc.)
• Additional goal: Create an FTP client library
• Language: Assembler/FASM
• Skill level: beginner/intermediate
• Importance: High
• Mentor: hidnplayr
• Links: File Transfer Protocol (RFC959), CLI FTP client (demo)

Torrent client

Summary: Write a (bit-)torrent client for KolibriOS

Details:

• Primary goal: Implement a torrent client similar to µTorrent Free edition
• Language: Assembler/FASM
• Skill level: intermediate/advanced
• Importance: High
• Mentor: hidnplayr
• Links: FIXME

XMPP/Jabber client

Summary: Write a XMPP/Jabber library and client for KolibriOS

Details:

• Primary goal: Write basic xmpp library/client
• Additional goal: Implement some xmpp extentions
• Language: Assembler/FASM
• Skill level: intermediate/advanced
• Importance: High
• Mentor: dunkaist
• Links: XMPP spec, XMPP extentions

Music player

Summary: Improve the current music player in Kolibri

Details:

• Primary goal: Rewrite the current music player (ac97snd), in FASM, and improve its functionality

* Support for file formats wav, mp3 and xm (using available external libraries)

* Support for playlists (m3u)

* A time display

• Additional goal:

* Use of system wide hotkeys to control player

* Support for metadata (ID3, ...)

* More codecs (flac, vorbis, ...)

* Audio indication (oscillograph, bar graph, ...)

* Show cover art from files or album folder

* Fade in/out and/or crossover

* Streaming radio (at least mp3 over http stream)

* Skins

* Media library

• Language: Assembler/FASM (C/C++ to port codec)
• Skill level: intermediate/advanced
• Importance: High
• Mentors: hidnplayr / dunkaist
• Links: AC97SND (MP3 player in C), Sound drivers and architecture, Flac decoder,Minimp3 (minimalistic mp3 decoding library), SuperMP3 (IDv3 tag demo)

Web browser: WebView

Summary: Improve existing text-only web browser WebView - add more functionality and compatibility

Details:

• Primary goal: Have mostly complete HTML4 support on a good enough level to read non-complex (mobile?) websites
• Secondary goal: Add certain elements of CSS, speed optimizations
• Language: Sphinx C--. May require writing a few lines in FASM though
• Skill level: intermediate/advanced
• Importance: High
• Mentors: punk_joker / hidnplayr

Links:

• HTML 4.01 Specification
• Work done so far on WebView (mostly in Russian). If you don't know Russian, you can read English translation using Google-Translate

QR-code in boot log

Summary: Add a QR-code (containing the debug log) at the end of boot process

Details:

• Description: Sometimes KolibriOS cannot boot on a certain hardware configuration (gets stuck during or after boot process). In such cases, we request the user having this problem to enable debug log at boot time, take a photo of the screen and show it to us (in the forum). However, sometimes taking a good quality photo can be quite challenging (bad camera, shaking hands etc.) and the attached photo is so blurry to the point the debug log cannot be even read. The idea suggested hereby is to simultaneously encode the debug log which is outputted on the screen, to the form of QR-code, and show the resulting QR-code on empty space on the screen. In such way, any user possessing a smartphone with a camera and QR-code scanner, could scan the QR-code and submit the encoded text directly on our forums (without having a need to take a photo), and our developers, in turn, would get the debug log text immediately and won't have to unscramble a blurry photo.
• Language: Assembler/FASM
• Skill level: beginner/intermediate
• Mentor: dunkaist

Drivers

Writing drivers is about new hardware and filesystems.
Knowledge of specifications and previous experience are not required but surely desirable.

Ethernet driver(s)

Summary: Write an Ethernet driver

Details:

• Primary goal: Support for popular Broadcom, Atheros or Marvell Yukon ethernet cards
• Additional goal: A second driver / Improve documentation / ...
• Language: Assembler/FASM
• Skill level: intermediate/advanced
• Importance: Medium
• Mentor: hidnplayr
• Links: BCM57XX programmers guide, Writing network drivers for KolibriOS

SD Host Controller

Summary: Add support for SD Host Controller

Details:

• Primary goal: Write driver for particular controller
• Additional goal: Test and update driver to work for all controllers
• Language: Assembler/FASM
• Skill level: intermediate/advanced
• Importance: High
• Mentor: dunkaist
• Links: SD specifications

USB devices

Summary: Add USB drivers for the new USB stack (webcams, gamepads, joysticks, tablets, etc.)

Details:

• Primary goal: Write USB driver for currently unsupported device (you should have one)
• Additional goal: Adopt code to work with all devices of the same class
• Language: Assembler/FASM
• Skill level: intermediate/advanced
• Importance: High
• Mentor: XVilka
• Links: USB device classes

Filesystem support

Summary: Improve filesystem support in KolibriOS

Details:

• Primary goal: Update/fix read-write support for EXT2/3/4 filesystems (partially done)
• Alternative goal: Add write support for the NTFS filesystem (read-only support already exists)
• Language: Assembler/FASM
• Skill level: intermediate/advanced
• Importance: High
• Mentor: dunkaist
• Links: Filesystems in KolibriOS

System wide tasks

These tasks comprise both user space and kernel space work. Some developers consider them as of most importance for KolibriOS.
Architecture and algorithm design skills are highly desirable.

Unicode support

Summary: Write userspace library and font server to handle unicode strings and fonts

Details:

• Primary goal: Write library to decode/encode UTF-8 and sort/compare/etc unicode strings
• Additional goal: Write basic font server
• Language: Assembler/FASM
• Skill level: intermediate
• Importance: Vital
• Mentor: dunkaist
• Links: small utf-8 library, good raster font format

Widget toolkit

Summary: Extend Box_lib (a set of separate widgets) to create a full-featured widget toolkit

Details:

• Primary goal: Design architecture and implement focus handling, callbacks and other core ideas
• Additional goal: Integrate box_lib widgets to this framework
• Language: Assembler/FASM
• Skill level: beginner/intermediate/advanced
• Importance: Vital
• Mentor: dunkaist
• Links: FIXME