Re: GSoC 2026 - Looking up for a mentor

On Mon, 2026-03-02 at 11:02, Théo Daron <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi everyone !

> My name is Théo, I am a Belgian student and I'd love applying to gsoc this year :)

> While going through the gsoc project ideas list, this particular subject caught
> my attention:

>> Unified kernel tracing interface

>> The goal of the project is to identify useful kernel tracepoints, and
>> design and implement a unified interface that can be used by different
>> consumers to collect information about the event corresponding to a
>> particular tracepoint.
>> This would make it easier for new subsystems to
>> collect information from existing tracepoints, rather than modifying the
>> core kernel to add more hooks.
>> An additional aim would be to ensure that
>> such tracepoints have minimal overhead, probably by using hot-patching to
>> enable and disable a particular tracepoint. FreeBSD-CURRENT now uses clang
>> 10.0, which implements the "asm goto" construct that could be useful here.
>> (<https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas#Unified_kernel_tracing_interface>)

> This looks interesting to me, as it would allow me to observe many different
> parts of the kernel and gain a better understanding of FreeBSD's internal
> workings. I also really like this idea as I am not confident enough in my
> networking skills to engage on some networking-related project, and the
> unified kernel tracing interface idea looks like it does not require such
> experience in networking.

> However, I cannot see anyone willing to mentor this on the website, so I thought
> maybe someone here would like to :)

> On a side note, I really like what y'all are doing here with freebsd, thanks for
> putting all this work in !

> Greetings from Belgium,
> Thanks for your time                                    ,

Hi Théo,

Below is a reply I sent to someone else interested in this project.

I'm copying Mark Johnston, who originally added this project idea a few
years ago.  He's no longer listed on the project because he took some
time off from mentoring, but based on an exchange with someone else who
was interested in the project, he may be available to mentor again this
year.  Mark did say that he feels the project is still worth doing, but
mentioned it's not high of the list of useful projects.

Mark may not be able to respond until March 19, though.

Kind regards,
Joe