[GSoC 2026] Introduction and Inquiring about Real asynchronous I/O

[Aarnav Pai <me%aarnavpai.in@localhost>]

Hi all,

I am Aarnav, a Computer Science student studying at the International
Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. I wish to make an
impact on OSS, and GSoC is a very convenient way for students like me
to contribute. I also wanted to use this opportunity to learn more about
low-level systems, and this project implementing real asynchronous I/O
in NetBSD feels perfect for working towards this goal.

I have worked with asynchronous I/O in the past, but mostly only in
userland. I have built a scheduler or two, but they were mostly toys and
certainly not built into any kernel. I've worked with Linux's io_uring
and other schedulers like Rust's tokio and OCaml's eio. I am excited to
implement something in an actual kernel which could be used by thousands
of people.

However, I am relatively unexperienced in this field, and I would love
guidance in how to get started: if there's any reading material or small
projects to do that you recommend for getting familiar with this task,
that'd be a great help. I will slowly make my way through the NetBSD
website and get it installed on my computer in the meanwhile. I'll work
on all the steps suggested in the guidelines, like rebuilding the kernel
and userland, reading through the source code, and seeing some similar
implementations on other BSDs/Linux.

I write this email to ask the mentor (or anyone else willing to help)
for any reading material, tasks, or any other instructions that can help
me in this journey. I will be studying up on and experimenting with
NetBSD after my exams end. I currently daily-drive Linux on Desktop, but
have worked with FreeBSD and OpenBSD before (on servers).

I have good experience with the Rust, C, and Zig progarmming languages
(as far as low-level programming languages go), and I have worked with
low-level programs before, but not a kernel. I have contributed to
various open-source projects before, though only through git. I hope to
learn a lot from this programme and also provide the community with a
valuable contribution.

Thank you,
Aarnav Pai.