Re: GSoC 2020 - The NetBSD Foundation - Emulating linux timer.. syscalls

[Stephen Borrill <sborrill%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On 22/03/2020 21:34, Humayun Mulla wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> My name is Humayun Mulla, I am a graduate student pursuing MS in
> Computer Science from State University of New York, Binghamton. I have a
> total work experience of 6 years of which 1 year as an Assistant
> Professor and 5 years in the software industry.  
> My Github link - https://github.com/HumayunMulla & LinkedIn profile -
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/humayun-mulla-02719727/.
> 
> I have taken an Operating System course in the previous semester and I
> have developed an interest in understanding how things work at such root
> level in the computer system. As a part of the course I have done
> different projects which vary from developing a shell that can execute
> all the commands given to it. In addition to that added some features to
> the program so that it can do I/O redirection and implemented
> inter-process communication. Also another assignment involved developing
> a kernel module that does 5-level page walk and printing the physical
> address of any given process ID. The last project that I did was to
> solve producer-consumer problem using a named pipe, i.e. by developing
> character device driver that can act as an interface between multiple
> producers & consumers.
> 
> I know I am late to approach you but I taught of better to learn to walk
> first and then run. Therefore I spent the last couple of weeks in
> understanding and implementing Live VM Migration. And also understanding
> about how timer system calls work in Linux environment.
> 
> I wanted to know if there are any pre-requisite tasks that I need to
> complete before submission of my application. I am looking forward to
> work under your mentor-ship on emulating linux timer.. syscalls using my
> knowledge and your guidance. Hoping to hear from you soon. Thank you for
> your time and consideration.

As Christos said, you should ensure you can actually get NetBSD running
on your chosen device or emulator. Better still, ensure you can build a
kernel and boot from your built kernel. I suggest you start with amd64,
but the finished code will need to work on i386 too.

As you suggest, you should also try to understand how the timer system
calls work on Linux and think about how you could test the operation.

-- 
Stephen