Funded project(s) to improve Linux emulation

[Martin Husemann <martin%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

The NetBSD core team is looking at finding volunteers or funded workers
willing to help improve our linux emulation. We have an offer from
Precedence Technologies to co-fund some of this developement, especially
the Citrix sub-projects.

At this point it is not clear how many of these projects will be funded,
and how many takers would be involved. If you have knowledge and interest
to help in some of this as a volunteer, please let us know.

The current state of Linux emulation is greatly affected by 
incompatibilities in the futex emulation, so completition/merging
of the thorpej-futex branch may be a prerequisite for some of the
projects explained below.

If you would like to work on some of this under a funding contract, please
mail us a quote stating a timing estimate and if possible a fixed price,
or an hourly rate and and maximum of hours you expect to need for this.

The improvements we are looking for consist of multiple sub-projects,
you can offer to work on single ones or a collection of items. If your
work offered depends on some of the others being completed upfront, please
state so (mostly it should be obvious, but just to make sure we topologicaly
sort everything correctly).

The tasks we are looking for takers are:

 - Implement missing timer sysctls and timerfd_* syscalls.
   For timerfd_* consider adding them natively and do a small compat shim
   for linux emul. Init public discussion about native timerfd_*.

 - Implement epoll(2) and friends for linux emulation.
   Consider a native implementation and small compat shim, and start a public
   discussion about it.

 - Improve stability (current code can easily panic the kernel)
   and add a test framework (might be pkgsrc based and create test binaries
   by cross compilation, does not need to use ATF).

 - Improve compat linux on arm

 - Improve linux audio support

 - Make current versions of the Citrix Workspace App runnable under
   linux emulation on NetBSD/i386. Precedence can provide test accounts
   on backend servers.

 - Extend support for the Citrix Workspace App to amd64.

 - Extend support for the Citrix Workspace App to some arm platform(s).

 - Add support for linux drm (DRI kernel support) for the version of DRI
   we support natively by the time this project runs.

 - Update our pkgsrc compat framework to newer libs if possible after
   the other improvements are done. Publish a list of other missing things
   if there are any blockers.

Please contact us at core%NetBSD.org@localhost.

Martin Husemann
on behalf of the NetBSD core team.