Archived/OutreachProgramForWomen/Round8

From Xen
Icon Info.png The application deadline for OPW has closed for 2014.


Xen Project and OPW

Opw-poster-2014-May-August.png

The Xen Project Advisory Board will be sponsoring one intern for Round 8 of the Gnome Outreach Program For Women which runs from May 2014 to August 2014. This program is an internship program specifically targeted at women: our goal is to increase womens' participation in the Xen Project. It is a continuation of the very successful GNOME Outreach Program for Women and we are running the program in conjunction with GNOME and other prominent open source projects.

Information For Applicants

How To Apply

The official application period for OPW Round 8 is March 19th. Please fill our your initial application and complete your Xen Project patch by March 19th. Applicants that do not complete the first patch will not be considered for an internship. Please take a look at our application FAQ for more info on how to fill our your initial application. Applicants will be notified by April 21st if they have been accepted.

If you are interested in being a Xen Project intern, please:

  • Join the xen-devel mailing list. Depending on the project you choose, you may also need to join xen-api or mirageos-devel@lists.xenproject.org (do check the information in the project). Check the list directory.
  • Join the #opw IRC channel on irc.gnome.org
  • Join the #xen-opw IRC channel on irc.freenode.net
  • Read our instructions for applying, and apply by March 19th.
  • Ask one of our friendly developers on for a bite size bug or work item. This can be reviewing somebodies code, submitting a patch, or similar and will need to be done by March 19th.

Community Reviewed Project List

For a list of project ideas see, General List of Development Projects or GSoc 2014

Useful Resources

Here is some links to guides, tools, development flows etc.

Information For Mentors

See here

Accepted Projects

Improvements to the block I/O paravirtualized Xen drivers

Date of insert: 21/04/2014; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: Unknown
Technical contact: Mentor: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk, Intern: Arianna Avanzini
Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@
IRC channel for project: #xen-devel
Difficulty: Unknown
Skills Needed: Unknown
Description: See here
Outcomes: Not specified, project outcomes


Mirage OS contributions and improvements

Date of insert: 21/04/2014; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: Unknown
Technical contact: Mentor: Richard Mortier, Intern: Mindy Preston
Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@
IRC channel for project: #xen-devel
Difficulty: Unknown
Skills Needed: Unknown
Description: 1 booting on the myriad cloud providers remains a total pain, so figuring out how to create one command that takes some credentials and gets a unikernel started on rackspace/amazon/openstack would be very handy. There's also cloud-init to look at.

2 protocol bisimulations against existing implementations: for a number of our libraries, we'd like a way to test our protocol code against standard implementations and verify that they are functionally equivalent. In certain cases, we will of course know that they are not, so we should be able to mark those as TODOs in our code. Good protocol testing choices: the TCP/IP stack vs Linux, the Cohttp web stack vs Nginx/Apache, the emerging SSL stack vs OpenSSL (important!)

3 new functionality: adding IPv6 support into mirage-net would be fairly straightforward and rather useful. Multipath TCP and/or TCPcrypt are more difficult but in scope.

4 If you feel like low-level hackery, porting Xen MiniOS to ARM would be a difficult but exceedinly rewarding project, as Mirage would then run on embedded devices like the Cubieboard2. This is a kernel hacking heavy project.

5 you could also pen test the heck out of the libraries to find and fix denial of services (e.g. unbounded reads in Cohttp for long headers, that sort of thing). We know of quite a few, but a structured set of attacks would help keep them out.
Outcomes: Not specified, project outcomes