Google Summer of Code 2016 Ideas

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Revision as of 04:00, 1 March 2016 by Colin Finck (talk | contribs) (NT "Wine audio" driver)
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This page lists all project ideas for our Google Summer of Code 2016 application. Students should also visit our general GSoC 2016 page for more information including a Student Guide.

Your idea!

We are eager to hear about your proposal to improve either ReactOS or its infrastructure. Come and propose your project on ReactOS developers mailing-list or on IRC, to get a feedback about its feasability. If your project is doable, we will be glad to provide you a mentor so that you can succeed in your project.

Don't forget that ReactOS is a big project and application fields are wide. You can choose between user-mode, kernel-mode developer. But also between application, or dll/driver developer. Or between working on ReactOS itself or on extra tools used by developers for their daily work on ReactOS. And in the end, if all you prefer is web development, we also have needs there.

Skills needed
  • Yours
Difficulty

The one you'll have set

Extras

You'll be working on your own project and be able to choose its direction along with your mentor :-).

Drivers

TCP/IP Driver

Useful for: End-users

Currently, ReactOS implements TCP/IP driver using lwIP library. However, having an own TCP/IP implementation which does not rely on "heaps of hacks" around existing implementation/libraries would be of great benefit. The new driver needs to be developed as drop in replacement for Windows tcpip.sys which would allow to thoroughly test the implementation in a running Windows environment and fix possible compatibility issues in ReactOS.

Benefits
  • Get rid of thirdparty library dependency
  • Better source code
  • Better compatibility and/or performace
References
Needed Skills
  • Windows Networking stack knowledge
  • TCP/IP protocol tech knowledge
Extra

Make the performance of a new tcpip.sys in Windows better than its native driver. Ambitious, but fun.

NT "Wine audio" driver

Useful for: End-users

Currently, ReactOS imports mmdevapi DLL from Wine, but it doesn't have a "driver" for it. In Wine, the driver is an implementation of various COM interfaces on top of libraries such as ALSA or OSS. However, it is perfectly possible to implement such a driver for Windows NT (preferably Vista+) using audio IOCTL to directly talk to the windows device.

Benefits
  • Vista+ compatible sound stack (our portcls.sys is already there)
  • Importing the latest Wine audio related libraries becomes possible (winmm, mmdevapi, dsound, etc.)
  • One place to rule them all: the only direct interface between user mode and driver.
References
Needed Skills
  • Windows Audio Stack knowledge
  • COM knowledge

NTFS driver improvements

Useful for: End-users and developers

During the last spring, NTFS support was finally added in ReactOS. If it was a major step forward, it still requires huge amount of work. It was implemented without caching support, and some features of NTFS are also totally ignored. We are looking for students willing to discover one of the most used file system and to improve its supports in ReactOS. There are various options offered to students: either work on improvements for RO support and/or start implementing RW features.

Benefits
  • Allowing ReactOS to interact with volumes managed in recent Windows
  • Perhaps allowing ReactOS to have a journaled system
References
  • Various documents on the Internet (including MSDN)
  • Windows Internals books
  • NTFS-3G FUSE driver
Needed Skills
  • Kernel world knowledge
  • FUSE dev knowledge might be a plus

Networking

NFS Client

Useful for: End-users and developers

It would be beneficial for ReactOS and Windows users to have the ability to access other servers using NFS. For this project, a readonly command line implementation would be enough.

Benefits

That would allow ReactOS (and also Windows) to access NFS sharepoints.

References

RFCs! 1094, 1813, 3530

Skills needed
  • Network development experience.
  • Knowledge/familiarity with NFSv4 protocol or desire to learn it; shouldn't be that hard.

SSH Service

Useful for: End-users and developers

Implement a native Windows service for accepting SSH connections and authenticating with Windows accounts to allow the user to interact with Windows through the command prompt should they not need access to the GUI shell. Once authenticated, any commands passed through SSH are executed using the user's credentials to prevent abuse of the service's privileges. And as the user is not technically logged in, there are no restrictions with respect to how many connections are permitted except as system resources allow.

Benefits
Besides cygwin, few options are available for users who wish to remote into a Windows machine for simple command line access. Cygwin is also horrendously intrusive on Windows systems. This implementation would provide a free SSH server implementation for Windows that was designed to integrate cleanly and present users with access to the Windows command shell, not try and lie to the user and pretend they are in a Unix environment. As a remote administration tool, this opens Windows systems to considerably more flexibility for connecting to and managing them. Administrators on Linux systems will also not need to relax security settings on Windows in order to use Linux RDP clients.
Skills Needed
  • Network development experience.
  • Knowledge/familiarity with SSH protocol.


Terminal Services

Useful for: End-users and developers

Implement support for terminal services, allowing inbound remote desktop connections to ReactOS. This encompasses implementation of input and video drivers to handle output over the network.

The terminal services system provides functionality for securely connecting remote clients and servers, for channeling communication between components of remote clients and servers, and for managing servers. It implements the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) which is a multi- channel protocol that allows users of a remote client to connect to a server over a network.

Benefits
Terminal services support would allow ReactOS to service as a terminal server/thin client server. Organizations that wish to provide a shared workstation with Windows would have a free alternative that does not have complex licensing terms covering multi-session usage. The display driver for terminal services can also be used to support fast user-switching and even possibly multi-monitor support.
References
Skills Needed
  • Network development experience.
  • Driver development experience.
  • Knowledge/familiarity with RDP protocol.

Durability

Kernel mode test suite

Useful for: Developers

Improve our existing kernel mode test suite (created by a previous successful GSoC student) by adding comprehensive new tests in areas previously untouched by the test suite like the kernel caching APIs and PnP. The goal is to extensively test Native API functions exported by the kernel. Reference behavior could be checked by running the test suite on original Windows operating system.

Benefits
  • Improved system stability.
  • More information about undocumented behavior.
  • Improved compatibility with third party drivers.
Skills Needed
  • Native API knowledge
  • NT driver development skills

Win32k test suite

Useful for: Developers

Right now we have basically no tests that cover the win32k module. As win32k is the cornerstone of the interface between the Win32 Subsystem and the display drivers, lack of tests leads to inconsistency, guess work and frustration when it comes to improving driver compatibility. A virtual display driver (à la kmtest.sys) allows us to test the functionality and behavior of win32k. If time permits, it would also be possible to add a mechanism to test videoprt.sys functionality, and the relationship between a display driver and its miniport counterpart.

References
Benefits
  • Improved stability.
  • More information about undocumented behavior.
  • Improved compatibility with third party drivers.
Needed skills
  • Display drivers development experience
  • Win32 API knowledge

Usability enhancement

Applications Manager Rapps

Useful for: End-users

RAPPS is a lightweight GUI utility which downloads and installs various popular apps and redistributable packages in Windows and ReactOS. It can be significantly improved to become a really useful tool for not only for ReactOS but for Windows users also who want to manage their installed applications like Steam manages games installation/updating.

A list of features to be implemented:

  • Adding command line parameters support to RAPPS. For example: "rapps install chrome" (just like your favourite Linux distro package manager) or "rapps remove msvc2010_redist"
  • Separate download and install, so that a user could choose just to download the apps into a local cache and later install some or all of them (just like Steam does Download, then it asks to Install, or NVidia driver updaters for example)
  • Automatically "install" simple apps by unpacking the archive they come in and execute a script inside it (if any) which creates shortcuts on the desktop
Skills needed
  • WinAPI
  • C language
Difficulty

Medium

Extras

A chance to work on an app potentially used by many people throughout the world


GUI 1st Stage Installer

Useful for: End-users

To make ReactOS more user friendly for installation, a GUI installation instead of a rather limited text-mode installer is needed. This could be run off of the LiveCD and act as a frontend to the disk formatter and installer we already have implemented.

Benefits
Having a GUI installer would allow the project to merge the bootcd and LiveCD and ensure that the LiveCD gets more testing to make sure it is not broken and simply neglected. A GUI installer would also be less intimidating to new users, especially those used to Vista or 7's installer.
Skills Needed
  • Win32 API familiarity.
  • Partitioning and setup experience.

Enhancing web presence of ReactOS

Implement a REST API in testman

Useful for: Developers

For its development, ReactOS project has been using with success for years a complete tools set. Each time a commit is made to our trunk, our buildbot infrastructure (https://build.reactos.org) is in charge of rebuilding trunk and starting a bunch of tests (circa 10M tests) on it to make sure not regressions came in. When these tests are done, they are uploaded to testman (https://www.reactos.org/testman), which makes them properly readable and usable for developers. Over years, the question of being able to catch more or less automatically regressions patterns was raised. Also, regtests provide a good performance indicator for ReactOS and evaluating their performances over commits can be critical as well.

There is then a need to be able to directly query Testman via an API to gather the raw data (tests, time to perform then) so that more tools can make use of these results. The student would then have the responsibility to implement such an API into testman directly.

Skills needed
  • PHP/MySQL development
  • REST API development
Difficulty

The project in itself shouldn't be difficult. Testman is a well-known product develop in-house. But a deep attention will have to be set on security and the performances of the API.

Extras

If the student goes fast enough, we will be able to extend this project, by for instance looking at how to develop a skeleton application to make use of the API. Or to directly develop a complete application to evaluate the performances of the tests over time.