Google Summer of Code 2015 strace participation

[Dmitry V. Levin]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 05:51:44AM -0800, Philippe Ombredanne wrote:
> Fellow stracers:
> The GSOC is on and we had a decent run last year.
> I think this is worth it and we should participate this year again.
> Dmitry agreed.
> I will setup the wiki pages accordingly ...
> Who wants to join up as a mentor?

I can mentor 1 or maybe 2 students.

> What would be some of the projects ideas we could have?

The most important thing we need that could be done as a student project
is a test suite that covers every syscall.  From one side, it would be
educational for any student who is interested in syscall internals because
writing syscall parsers and tests for them is the second best way to find
out how syscalls work.  From another side, a comprehensive test suite is a
prerequisite for any major change in strace source code.  This test suite
project doesn't have to be a work from scratch, there are already existing
tests (e.g. ltp/testcases/kernel/syscalls and sandbox/tests) that could
be used as a starting point.

Another interesting project is implementing reliable multiarch support.
My implementation idea was to separate all personality-specific parsers
from universal ones, compile these parsers for each personality using
gcc -E -m32/-mx32 and preprocessor tricks, and hook up appropriate
parsers to syscall tables.  This approach requires good understanding of
strace internals and implies a lot of changes to already existing code,
so it's a less likely candidate for a student project.


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