[Rust-VMM] Call for GSoC and Outreachy project ideas for summer 2022

[Alex Bennée]

Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha at gmail.com> writes:

> Dear QEMU, KVM, and rust-vmm communities,
> QEMU will apply for Google Summer of Code 2022
> (https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/) and has been accepted into
> Outreachy May-August 2022 (https://www.outreachy.org/). You can now
> submit internship project ideas for QEMU, KVM, and rust-vmm!
>
> If you have experience contributing to QEMU, KVM, or rust-vmm you can
> be a mentor. It's a great way to give back and you get to work with
> people who are just starting out in open source.
>
> Please reply to this email by February 21st with your project ideas.
>
> Good project ideas are suitable for remote work by a competent
> programmer who is not yet familiar with the codebase. In
> addition, they are:
> - Well-defined - the scope is clear
> - Self-contained - there are few dependencies
> - Uncontroversial - they are acceptable to the community
> - Incremental - they produce deliverables along the way
>
> Feel free to post ideas even if you are unable to mentor the project.
> It doesn't hurt to share the idea!
>
> I will review project ideas and keep you up-to-date on QEMU's
> acceptance into GSoC.
>
> Internship program details:
> - Paid, remote work open source internships
> - GSoC projects are 175 or 350 hours, Outreachy projects are 30
> hrs/week for 12 weeks
> - Mentored by volunteers from QEMU, KVM, and rust-vmm
> - Mentors typically spend at least 5 hours per week during the coding period
>
> Changes since last year: GSoC now has 175 or 350 hour project sizes
> instead of 12 week full-time projects. GSoC will accept applicants who
> are not students, before it was limited to students.

I'm certainly up for mentoring new devices for vhost-device (rust-vmm
vhost-user backends). Since we've become a code owner we're trying to
clear the backlog (virto-vsock and virtio-block) but there are plenty of
others that could be done. Of particular interest to me are:

  - virtio-rpmb (we have a working C implementation I wrote)
  - virtio-snd (in flight virtio spec)
  - virtio-video (again we have a working C version against v3)
  
With my other hat on there are numerous TCG plugin projects that could
be done. Adding basic plugins is fairly straight forward but it would be
interesting to look at what is required to do a more involved plugin
like panda-re's taint analysis (following ptrs as they move through the
system). This will likely need some additional features exposed from the
plugin interface to achieve.

With that in mind there is also the idea of a central registry for
register values which is a prerequisite for expanding access to TCG
plugins but could also bring various quality of life improvements to
other areas. I've written that up on a page:

  https://wiki.qemu.org/Internships/ProjectIdeas/CentralRegisterRegistry

-- 
Alex Bennée