Re: Interested in NUMA for GSoC and looking for mentorship

On Thu, 2026-03-26 at 22:10, Tanya Agarwal <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi all,

> I'm a software engineer with 3-years of experience. I did my M.tech from Delhi
> Technical University in Power Electronics and B.Tech. in Electrical
> Engineering from Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Agra. I have studied
> OS from OSTEP book (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP)
> and completed A Beginner's Guide to Linux Kernel Development (LFD103)
> https://trainingportal.linuxfoundation.org/courses/a-beginners-guide-to-linux-kernel-development-lfd103.
> I want to learn more on Operating Systems and contribute to
> open-source.

> I was reading the freebsd wiki and I'm able to set up a FreeBSD
> virtual machine in my Linux+QEMU setup, and boot it successfully.

> I want to participate in GSoC and I was looking at FreeBSD docs
> and found freebsd has missing support in NUMA (
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/NUMA). I have some experience of NUMA through
> online OS courses, and I know that NUMA is very important for server
> workload performance and horizontal scaling.

> Is there any problem statement that I can target in NUMA for GSoC. I
> would be grateful to have guidance and mentorship on this topic.

> Thank you for your time and consideration. Any guidance on this would
> be appreciated.

> Thanks,
> Tanya

Hello Tanya,

It's nice to hear you're interested in working on FreeBSD.

The NUMA wiki page you found is quite old (it hasn't been updated in
many years), and FreeBSD has had some level of NUMA support since
FreeBSD 9.0, according to [0].

There may still be work to do on NUMA, but unless you hear back very
soon from someone familiar with that part of the tree, you should start
looking for more up-to-date project ideas.

- [1] FreeBSD Summer of Code ideas
- [2] Recent discussions on the FreeBSD mailing lists
- [3] The FreeBSD issue tracker

With the GSoC proposal deadline quickly approaching (March 31), this
will be quite challenging, so I recommend reaching out to potential
mentors as soon as possible.

Good luck, and I hope you're able to find a project that fits your
interests.

Joe

[0] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?numa
[1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCodeIdeas
[2] https://lists.freebsd.org/
[3] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/