Plan 9 and related technologies cover a huge range of topics. Below we've put together a list of some ideas which we think would be good candidates for stundents looking for summer-sized projects with us. Each idea includes at least a brief description and a list of "sponsors" for the idea (people who've suggested it or volunteered to work with folks on it). Ideas are rated for estimated difficulty from 1 to 5 stars (1=easy, 5=hard) and may contain links to further information or discussion.
Note! We actively encourage students to submit applications for projects not on this list, too. We've accepted such projects most of the years we've participated. Plan 9 (and its cousins) embody a different way of approaching problems, and we get most excited when we see a student (or anyone, for that matter) apply those ideas to their own set of problems.
In addition to this ideas page, prospective students should look over our GSoC Student Expectations and be prepared to submit an application matching our GSoC Student Application. For more information, note our general GSoC page.
If you're looking for additional ideas, you might check out the todo, bugs, and ideas lists for Inferno, 9atom, and Acme-SAC. These lists are more general and not everything on them will all be a good size for a summer, but they are good sources of inspiration. Some of the most promising fits are duplicated below. There's also our prior editions of this page: gsoc-2013-ideas, gsoc-2012-ideas, and gsoc-2011-ideas.
If you're a community member and you have an idea you'd be willing to act as mentor for, please add it to this page! Just follow the format given and provide a good summary of the project. If you'd like, create and link a wiki page with as much detail as you'd like (but please don't swamp this page). Please only add ideas you're willing to mentor (or have directly spoken to whoever you're marking down as mentor).
Ideas related to Plan 9's graphics systems, including kernel devices, window systems, and supporting libraries.
The Plan 9 windowing system is quite different from X11. Rendering is handled by the kernel graphics driver itself, with a user-mode application responsible for window management issues like placement, sizing, labels, and visability. Today, the only such program in the main distribution is rio(1). It would be useful to have a few alternatives. Design and implement an alternative interface. Some popular ideas include tiling interfaces (similar to acme(1) or X11's wmii or dwm), exploring keyboard-driven control, or touch-based interaction.
A student looking to work on a project in this area should be familiar with Plan 9's existing windowing system, including rio(1) and draw(3), at a minimum. It would be good to also review some of the rio hacks found in the contrib index. Other potentially useful starting points are Anthony's nile and Sigrid's riow
The cifs client currently in Plan 9 was written long ago and doesn't even appear to support SMB2. There appears to be a reasonable Go library for SMB which could be the basis for an updated SMB client. SMB is one of the more common protocols in use by modern NAS software; getting a modern client would enable interesting usecases such as booting from a minimal ramdisk, then mounting /usr and additional binaries from a SMB share. This project will require the student to familiarize themselves with the SMB library, a Go 9P library, and factotum (for credential storage).
The pq database is very modular. The principle data store is the ev module. The distribution also included a module which speaks a simple protocol to talk to an external pq server. Other modules have existed in the past to retrieve data from other sorts of servers, such as LDAP or SQL servers, but all were done outside the scope of the open source release. It would be useful to have some of these again. Define a few modules and implement them over the summer.
Start with the existing pq distribution and identify one or modules you'd like to add. This project can be relatively simple or very complex, depending on what you decide to implemnt and how smart you want to make the module.
Write a 9P file server that can be instructed to create a file tree and associate each node with external directories, files or processes. Very roughly, the prototype file tree instructions might look something like:
/ fst/ = /usr/fst/www/ edit/ snarf > /dev/snarf paste < /dev/snarf mouse | fd0rw /dev/mouse
Project ideas related to the kernel, the various ports, or driver support. Note that ports to new hardware are always interesting, but are particularly challenging for GSoC, given both the timeline and the need to get mentor and student on the same hardware. Pick anything and get Plan 9 working on it!
The Raspberry Pi port, initially done by Richard Miller, has proven a very popular platform for Plan 9. It works well, but there is more that could be done with the hardware. We don't have any audio support, for example, and more could be done with the video driver. If you want to go a bit farther afield, we're not doing anything with the DSI or CSI connectors (nobody really is), although that'd involve getting the right hardware. It would be particularly fun to do a project involving a creative use of the GPIO pins.
Project ideas related to the web, either in Plan 9 tools providing web services or in ways to interact with Plan 9 systems.
The wikifs(4) in both Plan 9 and Inferno understand a very small set of cues when generating HTML. That set can be limiting. Replace it with something better, like Markdown. Markdown engines in C already exist and a few have already been ported to Plan 9, for example Discount (version 2.1.8, among others). Doing the Inferno version would be a bit more ambitious, as it would involve either porting an existing implementation to Limbo or writing a new one. Use any remaining time to convert any existing wiki docs that need it.
Project ideas related to compilers, development tools, or supporting libraries.
The LXR project has created some very useful tools for cross-referencing different source trees. This idea has been productively expanded by FXR to compare across operationg systems (FXR includes various BSDs, Linuxes, and an old Plan 9 tree). As Plan 9 evolves, it would be very useful to tree maintainers to have an easy way to find, track, and explore differences between trees. This project would be to provide tools to scan different source trees (at least the Bell Labs tree, 9atom, and 9front; possibly Inferno, Plan 9 from User Space, and others) and allow users to see specific changes, perhaps including changes over time.
Your proposal should describe the interface you're thinking about providing (file server? web application?), what you think some of the important issues are, and clearly define the scope of work (for example, will you be doing multi-way diffs, or just 1-to-1 comparisons?). Multiple Plan 9 sites would be happy to host the results of this work.
Note that porting the existing FXR or LXR are almost certainly not good starting points.
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