Hi there 👋,
My name is SD Asif Hossein, an enthusiastic Operating System and Low-Level developer. I am a student currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in engineering.
I am interested in one of the NetBSD projects, "Tickless NetBSD with high-resolution timers" as part of Google Summer of Code.
Why am I interested?
When I had compiled my first custom Linux kernel, I had seen a timer option saying "Tickless". I wondered what that was and doing some research I found out it's going to save me a lot of power (By stopping the periodic timer when the CPU is idle). But never wondered how it worked and how it was implemented. Now that I am into OS dev. and planning to have my own production Operating System, It's high time I figured out how the timers work. In Linux the Tickless timer (Tickless idle and Tickless full) is already implemented, there is no way to explore the functionality. Even if I have a way, there won't be much coding involved. But NetBSD on the other hand haven't yet implemented the Tickless configuration, which will allow me to deep dive into the concepts and implementation of Tickless and High-Resolution timers in general.
General Idea:
In this project I am expected to implement the Tickless timer (Most probably dynamic tick or completely tickless or both) using the High-Resolution timers. I have to implement the High-resolution timer support for that, as NetBSD's High-Resolution timer is still in development as far as I know. I also have to implement the architecture independent APIs to adopt the configuration, change all the functions that use the periodic timer, hardclock to use the tickless timer and make them provide service/schedule when needed finally converting all the software subsystems to tickless so that they avoid periodic work altogether; increasing power consumption of NetBSD.
It's a very challenging project and I am not sure whether I will be able to handle it. Maybe I will be able to or maybe I won't be able to. We won't know unless I give it a shot.
Therefore, I am very interested to contribute to this project. I am fairly new to Operating System dev and developed a hobby OS for learning purposes. This will be a very interesting and challenging journey for me. I hope you will find me capable 😃.
Waiting eagerly for your response. Thank you.
Regards.