Re: Student for GSoC 2008 - procfs

[Olaf Buddenhagen]

Hi,

>          Sorry all of you. I am extremely sorry for being so late in
> sending
> this mail.

You aren't late at all -- official application period is starting only on 
monday :-)

> I did go through few guides and tutorials on procfs
> on
> GNU/Linux system.
[...]
> Please give me some time to go through it fully since it is a pretty huge
> documentation and it takes some time to digest it.

It's very good that you already looked into all this stuff :-)

Note that it's not a problem if you don't know every detail of Linux procfs. 
Take a look into which parts of procfs are actually needed for tools like 
procfs, and concentrate on implementing that...

>   I have a working Installation of the GNU system[Debian GNU/HURD K-16], I
> checked out the CVS code of procfs in the hurdextras repo. I also read the
> Documentation thats there in the CVS [...]
> I am also going through the code. I hope you people understand that
> going through the entire code and understanding in less than 5 days is
> quite
> difficult for beginners.

Of course -- you seem to have done quite a lot already :-) You will have enough 
time to understand the details. For now, having an idea how stuff works in 
general and what you need to change is a very good start :-)

> I think its bit difficult to port all the features in
> GNU/Linux procfs to HURD in 3 months by a single person, though its not
> impossible(I also think its not necessary to port each and every feature
> thats available in GNU/Linux).

Indeed, we don't need all features -- only what's needed for procfs, top and 
similar tools.

>    I think most important of all the features that are to be made
> available
> are proc/<pid>/* features which are very important to implement process
> related functionalities. So we need to focus on it at the moment.
> Those features include
> /proc/<pid>/cpu
> /proc/<pid>/cwd
> correcting the problems in /proc/<pid>/environ
> /proc/<pid>/mem
> completing /proc/<pid>/stat
> /proc/cmdline
> /proc/swaps

/proc/<pid>/mem is problematic. Do we really need it for procps etc?

I don't know enough about the others -- what they do, what they are needed for. 
Could you give a short summary, why you think each one important?

> (This is only a rough idea of what can be done. I will draw the plan after
> discussion here is complete. I am open for all your inputs. I will be
> available in #hurd at the time which is convinient to you all. Please
> inform
> me so I can make myself available at that time. Please help me.)

I will only be online again Wednesday evening. But most of the time, someone 
else should be on IRC -- just keep in mind that people sometimes need quite 
long before they can reply :-)

Most people are online during the day and evening in european timezones -- 
roughly 12:00 to 24:00 UTC or so...

All in all, what you wrote above sounds quite promising -- I'm sure you will be 
able to hand in a very good application :-)

-antrik-
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