Re: Newbie Kernel Programmer looking for first project.

["Michael Litchard" <michael%schmong.org@localhost>]

I intend to use a xen DomU for this.
Can I compile -current in a 4.0 enviroment? Is this a cross-compilation thing?
maybe it would be more appropriate to move to -current on my Dom0.

On 6/30/08, Tim Rightnour <root%garbled.net@localhost> wrote:
>
>  On 30-Jun-2008 Michael Litchard wrote:
>  > Hi, I was referred to your open projects list, and I thought
>  > this one <http://www.netbsd.org/contrib/projects.html#aprint>, would
>  > be a good place to start. I want to run a Xen DomU for this project.
>  > Can someone help me with the steps involved in completing this efficiently?
>
>
> This is a pretty good one to start out with, just to kind of touch and see
>  different areas of the kernel.  The problem of course is that some of it will
>  be difficult to test, as you might not have a certain driver or such.
>
>
>  > I have visions of using grep and sed.
>
>
> Grep yes, sed no.  Most of these have to be done manually.  You have to decide
>  for each printf if it is appropriate to print it allways, or maybe just in
>  verbose boot mode.  I think at this point, most of the drivers are converted,
>  so its best to probably work on the core kernel stuff in sys/kern and maybe
>  some of the other subsystems around there.
>
>  I would suggest converting one file at a time, compiling, and tyring to boot
>  with it, to see if you can get some of the messages to appear.  Some of the
>  printfs might be behind a #ifdef DEBUG or otherwise, so you will likely have 
> to
>  turn those options on to actually test compile it.  I would then submit a PR 
> as
>  a change request for each one.
>
>  Long term, this won't keep you interested for very long.  It looks like a
>  number of projects were taken off the project page, and placed onto the 
> summer
>  of code page.  I would look through the ones on there, as most of the "low"
>  difficulty projects weren't taken.  Get your feet wet with this, learn to
>  compile the kernel, test messages, fiddle options, etc, then maybe move on to
>  something a bit harder.
>
>  Also, make sure you work on -current, and not 4.0 sources.  Forward porting
>  patches from 4.0 to -current is almost as much work as just doing it from
>  scratch, so if you do them against 4.0 they are unlikely to be applied.
>
>  http://www.netbsd.org/contrib/soc-projects.html
>
>
>  ---
>
> Tim Rightnour <root%garbled.net@localhost>
>  NetBSD: Free multi-architecture OS http://www.netbsd.org/
>  Genecys: Open Source 3D MMORPG: http://www.genecys.org/
>