gsoc

We're very glad that Haiku has been part of Google's Summer of Code this year again. We were granted five student projects to improve Haiku. But since we had so many good and worthwhile project proposals, we set out to start our very own Haiku Code Drive. We asked for your help in the form of donations, and we were absolutely overwhelmed by the response we got from you, our community: we were able to sponsor 4 more student projects to work on Haiku.

Yes, of course, you know all of that already. The reason for this review is that, since both coding events are officially over by now, I wanted to give you an overview of what has happened, and how the students fared. Not all projects have been success stories, but we were lucky to have found some very talented students this year. We're glad we had you!

Thanks to Google Summer of Code student Zhao Shuai successfully finishing his project Haiku does now feature support for swapping. As of revision 27233 it is enabled by default, using a swap file twice the size of the accessible RAM. The swap file size can be changed (or swap support disabled) via the VirtualMemory preferences.

Swap support finally allows building Haiku in Haiku on a box with less than about 800 MB RAM, as long as as the swap file is large enough. I tested this on a Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz with 256 MB RAM (artificially limited) and a 1.5 GB swap file. Building a standard Haiku image with two jam jobs (jam -j2) took about 34 minutes. This isn't particularly fast, but Haiku is not well optimized yet.

Haiku's swap implementation was heavily inspired by that of FreeBSD. At the moment it is not as sophisticated, but Zhao intends to borrow more of FreeBSD's optimizations.

It's official! Thanks to the incredible generosity of our community, and with a little help from Google, the Haiku Code Drive 2008 will sponsor four students, bringing the number of students that will be coding for Haiku this summer to nine. This is one more student than last year's eight sponsored by the GSoC alone! Shown below are the four selected students and their projects, in the order that the community ranked them through the Haiku Code Drive poll:

Salvatore Benedetto: BFS stress-testing, UDF port to new FS Haiku API

Jovan Ivankovic: CUPS port

Yin Qiu: ICMP error handling and propagation

JiSheng Zhang: DV media node

The response from the community to our call for donations to fund this program was incredible. In just two weeks, we received 120 donations from 24 countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and USA), for a total of approximately $7,500. The promptness, degree of generosity, and global reach of the response by the community to the Haiku Code Drive is unprecedented in the history of our project, and hopefully a sign of things to come in the future.

After a quite intensive and challenging review and selection process, we are pleased to announce that Haiku has been assigned five (5) student slots for the Google Summer of Code 2008. This year, Google accepted many more mentor organizations than ever before, which made the allotment of students slots a lot more competitive. We also received applications of very high quality, which is definitely a blessing, but also made the Haiku mentor's task of narrowing down to a final selection much tougher. After thorough review of all the applications, and carefully taking into consideration factors such as immediate benefits for our project, the likelihood of getting long-term contributors, and the availability of an appropriate mentor for any given project, we have come up with the final list of students that will be coding for Haiku during the GSoC 2008 program. Here it is:

With the help of a generous donator, Haiku, Inc. has acquired a major share of Google, Inc. and is now in the process of reorganizing Google for a major focus shift that will allow for wide distribution of Haiku R1 to OEMs. Distribution contracts have been signed with major mobile phone makers for an unprecedented availability of Phone and Handheld Integrated System Haiku (PHISH).

Also, as of this year, the Summer Of Code project is now officially renamed Summer of Assembler Poetry (SoAP).

We are very pleased to announce that, for the second straight year, Haiku has been accepted as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code. The student application period will start soon, so if you are a student who would like to work on a Haiku project for the GSoC 2008, please check out our List of GSoC Ideas and Students: How to Apply pages for detailed information on how to apply. If you still have any questions specific to GSoC after reading these pages, please contact the Haiku GSoC administrator (Bruno Albuquerque). If you have any general questions about Haiku and want to start familiarizing yourself with our community, which we encourage you to, please join the Haiku development mailing list and also feel free to stop by the #haiku IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Our friendly community members will be glad to help you out in pursuing a Haiku project for the GSoC 2008 and beyond.

Haiku Inc. recently received from Google a check for $4,000 for its participation in the last Google Summer of Code 2007 program. This is ten percent of the total $40,000 that Google disbursed to sponsor the eight Haiku related projects alloted for GSoC 2007. We want to thank Google for giving us the opportunity to participate in the program for the first time this year, and hope they will consider us again for next year.

The Google Summer of Code is a program designed to sponsor students to work in open source projects during the three summer months. Open source software projects like Haiku apply to become mentoring organizations, and put forward projects that students from all over the world can apply for. The mentoring organizations provide mentors to guide the students throughout the program and to assist them in the successful completion of their project. For each successfully completed project, Google pays $4,500 to the student and $500 to the mentoring organization.