[GSoC] Introduction and Microproject

[Karan Handa]

Greetings!

I'm a third year Computer Science major interested in getting involved
with the community, contributing to strace, and grokking C!

With regards to relevant background, I've worked with C code on small
projects. I'm also somewhat familiar with the internal structure of
xv6, which is a toy operating system being used in an Operating
Systems course that I'm a teaching assistant for. I'm familiar with
using UNIX based environments, syscalls, monitoring and profiling
programs, diagnostics, etc. I'm also deeply in sync with the CPU level
and hardware abstractions, so I'm aware of the lower-level issues when
programming in lower level languages and extremely careful and
meticulous when writing low-level code. With regards to open source,
I'm completely new but I'm excited to learn!

As for my microproject, I'm interested in adding a system call parser
/ ioctl command parser / netlink protocol parser.

Could you point me towards some resources for understanding the
general structure for strace as well as how to get started with the
microproject? I tried going back to the initial commits to try and
understand the initial barebones codebase, but the git commits only go
back until Feb 1999. Are the original 1992 commits available
somewhere?

Any additional tips would be greatly appreciated!

--
Regards,
Karan