I've been accepted into Google Summer of Code (2011) once more. If you don't know and are curious, I was accepted into Google Summer of Code 2008. This summary email to the OpenChange mailing list better describes what I accomplished that summer of 2008 with the OpenChange and KDE projects and my mentor Brad Hards.
This year I applied to the FreeBSD project and you can find a description of my proposal here.
I've already started talking to my mentor (Pawel Jakub Dawidek) and we're in the brainstorming phase.
There are some interesting obstacles that I will be facing this summer that I am looking forward to overcome. To begin with, except for starting to write a small hobby OS for educational purposes a long time ago, I've never really done any kernel-level development in the past. I have read much about OS design and implementation principles and have read through kernel sources. I'm also currently reading The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System.
Engineering-wise the first and foremost challenging obstacle that I am currently facing is the fact that the MAC framework doesn't really forward any path metadata to its modules. So, I'm trying to find a way to do this in a clean and modular way. Once I do, I can then use this data to match it with the vnodes of files that access needs to be restricted on.
I will try to keep posting as much as I can as the project develops.
As a bonus, here's a tool I've been using for browsing the FreeBSD sources. It's an LXR-based FreeBSD and Linux Kernel Cross-reference site. It also has the sources for other operating systems such as NetBSD, Darwin, Plan 9 and MINIX.
