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This year, MINIX 3 is participating in Google Summer of Code under the umbrella of the Microkernel Devroom confederation. This page provides a preliminary list of student projects and mentors. Right now, this page is preliminary: it is neither complete nor necessarily accurate. If you are a student interested in taking up one of the GSoC projects listed below, please contact mentors as appropriate. More instructions will follow soon. If you would like to sign up as a MINIX 3 mentor or make changes to this page, please coordinate with David van Moolenbroek.
Mentor: Michael Schloh von Bennewitz
MINIX 3 aims to be suitable for use on the high end of embedded ARM platforms. Important steps have been made in that direction, but there is much more work to be done. In this project, a concrete goal in that direction will be arranged together with the student, which could range from porting MINIX 3 to a board similar to those supported already, to implementing drivers to support for example Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) and/or Controller Area Network (CAN) bus devices.
Mentor: David van Moolenbroek
One of MINIX 3's key features is the ability to restart services – the components that make up most of the operating system – in the case that they crash. MINIX 3 currently supports two service crash recovery modes: stateful and stateless. The latter variant provides stronger guarantees, but requires involvement from the services around the crashed one in order to work properly. To that end, an internal crash notification API is used, but that API is now a decade old and has shown to come with severe limitations. In this project, the student will gather requirements, and design and implement a replacement API.