Google Summer of Code 2011 Ideas
This page lists all project ideas for our Google Summer of Code 2011 application. Students should also visit our general GSoC 2011 page for more information including a Student Guide.
Hardware Compatibility
ACPI HAL
Implementation of a Hardware Abstraction Layer that can interact with the ACPI interface for power management and device configuration.
- Benefits
- Most modern motherboards possess ACPI support. ReactOS’ system components are ACPI aware but cannot truly use ACPI until the hardware abstraction layer supports the specification. Proper power management would require that the OS support ACPI and until the entire hardware interface stack in ReactOS has support implemented, ReactOS will be limited to running in a compatibility mode.
- References
- ACPI specification: http://www.acpi.info/spec.htm
- The ACPI Component Architecture documentation: http://www.acpica.org/documentation/
- Skills Needed
- Kernel, driver development experience.
Debugging over a USB to Serial adapter
Implement a KD driver for debugging over a USB to Serial adapter. With the decreasing number of systems with a serial port, another mechanism for outputting debug information is needed. A low level USB driver that can output in serial format would help expanding the number of platforms that can be used to test ReactOS on. USB to serial adapters are quite prevalent, but outputting debug information out a USB port requires bypassing the need for traditional drivers or even a USB stack. This driver will serve a similar role as the current KDCOM driver.
- References
- USB Open Host Controller Interface specification: ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/supportinformation/papers/hcir1_0a.pdf
- USB Universal Host Controller Interface specification: http://download.intel.com/technology/usb/UHCI11D.pdf
- FTDI FT232R datasheet: http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Documents/DataSheets/ICs/DS_FT232R.pdf
- Prolific PL2303 datasheet: http://www.prolific.com.tw/eng/downloads.asp?ID=23
- VirtualKD, another KD driver for outputting debug information from a virtual machine: http://virtualkd.sysprogs.org/
- Techwiki:Kd
- Skills Needed
- Kernel, driver development experience.
EFI Support
Support running and booting of ReactOS on EFI systems instead of BIOS systems. This would allow running ReactOS on Intel Macs and other systems that do not use BIOS. Support must be added to freeloader and the ReactOS HAL. Support for GPT is already present in the kernel but the disk.sys driver does not know how to handle it. Furthermore, freeloader is unable to boot from GPT partitions due to limitations in Arc name handling. Lack of the VGA BIOS must be addressed as the ReactOS boot process relies heavily on one being present for display during the boot process.
- Benefits
- Ability to boot natively on Intel Macs would provide ReactOS with a relatively stable hardware platform for testing purposes thanks to Apple's hardware design philosophy. It would also present Mac users with another alternative to running Windows applications.
- References
- Unified Extensible Firmware Interface specifications: http://www.uefi.org/specs/ (or http://www.intel.com/technology/efi/)
- Skills Needed
- Kernel, driver development experience.
Intel High Definition Audio Bus Driver
Implement support for the Intel High Definition Audio specification for sound cards.
- Benefits
- Modern audio cards use the Intel High Definition Audio specification. Therefore they rely on a bus driver to communicate with the audio hardware. The goal is to write a bus driver which supports those new cards. The bus driver needs to work on a Microsoft NT system and with ReactOS.
- References
- HD Audio Device Driver Interface whitepaper: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg462966
- Programming the HD Audio DDI: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff536442%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
- HD Audio Bus Drivers: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff536434%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
- Skills Needed
- Kernel driver programming experience
- Bus driver programming experience
- Familiarity with Intel HD Audio specification
- Audio kernel streaming
Interface Driver Stack
Implement support for the protocols such as Bluetooth or Firewire to allow ReactOS to communicate with compatible devices. Requirements would be a working set of device drivers and providing the corresponding API, with potential supplemental work including development of control panel applets or applications to expose the new functionality.
- Benefits
This would open up possibilities such as data transfer to/from mobile devices, internet-over-cellphone scenarios or alternative input devices.
- References
- Bluetooth specifications https://www.bluetooth.org/Technical/Specifications/adopted.htm
- Firewire specifications http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=4659231
- Microsoft Bluetooth API documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa362932(v=vs.85).aspx
- Skills Needed
- Familiarity with kernel development and Windows sockets
Networking
Internet Protocol Helper
Implement the Internet Protocol Helper API for manipulating network interfaces.
- Benefits
- Internet Protocol Helper API allows for retrieval and modification of network configuration settings. As well as notification to applications when network configuration is changed. This is important to allow network administration of the local computer.
- Skills Needed
- Familiar with windows network and TCP/IP networking.
SSH Service
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 commandline 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.
TCP/IP Driver Replacement Using lwIP
Implement a new TCP/IP driver using lwIP to handle the needed protocols to replace the current one in ReactOS that is using oskit.
- Benefits
- lwIP is a compact and highly stand-alone library implementing various network protocols. Due to its portability, it can be easily integrated into third party products such as a driver without complicating future updates.
- References
- Learning About Protocol Drivers: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff557050(v=vs.85).aspx
- lwIP home page: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/lwip/
- Skills Needed
- Experience with windows driver framework and ndis protocol specific dispatch functions.
Terminal Services
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.
- 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.
- Skills Needed
- Network development experience.
- Driver development experience.
- Knowledge/familiarity with RDP protocol.
System Enhancements
Audio Mixer
Implement support for mixing of audio streams.
- Benefits
- Audio mixer is responsible for routing of multiple audio streams. This would be very beneficial to ReactOS as audio driver support has improved yet the use of these drivers is limited by the lack of an Audio Mixer. In the end of the project multiple audio streams should be able to be played at the same time.
- References
- Audio Mixer Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms705739(v=vs.85).aspx
- DirectKS Sample Application download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=D7667686-8467-4B10-8713-BF0281536320&%3Bdisplaylang=en
- Programming Services: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms685967%28v=VS.85%29.aspx
- "Secret Rabbit Code" (SRC) Sample Rate Converter: http://www.mega-nerd.com/SRC/
- Skills Needed
- Windows Services familiarity
- Basic Audio file format familiarity
- Audio mixing algorithms / libraries familiarity
- Basic kernel streaming familiarity
IFS Wrapper Driver
NT IFS drivers for alternate filesystems are relatively scarce, due partially to the complexity of the IFS interface and the lack of documentation for several years. A FUSE implementation for Windows is also not ideal compared to a genuine kernel mode IFS driver. A kernel mode wrapper IFS driver can however considerably ease development of filesystem drivers on Windows. A demonstration implementation using code derived from NTFS-3G would provide the foundation for future drivers for other non-Windows filesystems and also a testbench for ReactOS’ own filesystem library interface.
- Benefits
- Future efforts to allow Windows NT to read/write to other filesystems such as ZFS would be considerably eased with a wrapper driver.
- References
- Installable File System Design Guide: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff548143(v=VS.85).aspx
- Installable File System Kit Samples: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff548099(v=VS.85).aspx
- NTFS-3G driver & library: http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/
- Skills Needed
- Driver development experience.
- Filesystem development experience.
Performance Data Registry
Access to performance data on Windows is done primarily through the registry API, accessing something known as the performance data hive. This hive does not exist as a genuine file but is in reality a collection of data exported by various OS components, drivers, services, and even applications. Many of the performance values provided through the performance data registry is not available in any other form. The absence of support for performance counters renders many diagnostic utilities from Microsoft broken and is also an impediment to application compatibility. Condor is an example of a third party application that uses the performance data registry for process and resource usage tracking.
- Benefits
- Besides application compatibility, the performance data registry is one of the most difficult to use public interfaces in Windows. The layout of its data structures makes querying and accessing values a highly manual process. Documentation produced from this effort would provide better guidelines for third parties to access the performance data registry and better use the information published by the system and Microsoft's own applications such as the .NET runtime or the IIS service.
- References
- Description of performance counters and types in Windows 2003: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc776490%28WS.10%29.aspx
- Performance counter data structures: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa373093%28v=VS.85%29.aspx
- Example code for accessing performance data through registry: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa373219%28v=VS.85%29.aspx
- Skills Needed
- Registry API familiarity.
- Performance registry structure familiarity.
- Performance counter familiarity.
Security Controls
Implement support for user permissions based on Access Control Lists.
- Benefits
- This will allow separation of users into groups and better control over user privileges in ReactOS. Security controls will then allow supporting multiple users on the same system.
- Skills Needed
- Familiarity with Windows security and permissions models.
Management Console
Implement Microsoft Management Console (MMC). The MMC provides an interface for various management tools, both from Microsoft and third parties, called snap-ins. These snap-ins are standalone programs dynamically loaded into an MMC console to perform a specific configuration task, such as configuring a network or managing disk drives.
- Benefits
- Easier snap-ins development.
- Consistent user interface of management tools.
- One configurable place to access key management and configuration apps.
- References
- What is MMC: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb756943.aspx
- Developing for MMC 3.0: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/bb756923.aspx
- Skills Needed
- Basic Windows development experience.
- Knowledge of COM.
UI Enhancement
Font Driver
Implement the Adobe Type Manager Font (atmf) driver for text rendering. Currently text rendering is done by copying glyphs onto bitmaps verbatim instead of using the information provided by font glyphs to properly draw them. A display driver implements several GDI functions for loading and correctly drawing text based on their glyphs.
- Benefits
- The Win32 architecture provides an interface in which display drivers of various types can implement support for various rendering styles. A font driver would provide a testbench against that interface, which can then be fixed to add support for not only conventional display drivers for video output but also print drivers that may support special formats not supported by the baseline Win32.
- References
- GDI functions implemented by printer and display drivers: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff566549%28VS.85%29.aspx
- Skills Needed
- Font technology familiarity.
- Windows display driver development experience.
GUI 1st Stage Installer
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 live CD 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.
Layered Windows
Implement support for layered windows. Drawing operations to layered windows are redirected to a bitmap residing in memory. When a window needs to be repainted, the bitmap is copied onto the screen.
- Benefits
- Layered windows provide an efficient way to achieve complex effects like shadows. The stock menus provided to all applications use layered Windows to achieve the shadowing effect one sees and the current iteration of Windows Live Messenger relies on layered windows to achieve partial transparency.
- References
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997507.aspx
- http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dwayneneed/archive/2008/09/08/transparent-windows-in-wpf.aspx
- Skills Needed
- Windows display driver development experience.
Theme Service
Implement support for loading and applying global themes. The current support provided for themes is incomplete and does not follow the design in Windows to begin with. The classic Windows 2000 theme does not rely on theme support and is in fact a "default" look for when no themes are present.
- Benefits
- Implementing the theme service would allow greater customization of ReactOS' user interface and open the OS up to interface designers that wish to experiment on Windows but do not have access to a Windows license. The work would also benefit Wine by providing another testbench against which our respective theme implementations could be compared against.
- Skills Needed
- Windows service API familiarity.
- Win32 drawing familiarity.
Durability
Kernel mode test suite
Develop a kernel mode test suite, consisting of a framework and actual modularized tests. The goal is to extensively test Native API functions exported by the kernel. Reference behaviour could be checked by running the test suite on original Windows operating system.
- Benefits
- Improved system stability.
- More information about undocumented behaviour.
- Improved compatibility with third party drivers.
- Skills Needed
- Native API knowledge
- NT driver development skills