Re: Interested in NUMA for GSoC and looking for mentorship

Hi Joseph,

Thanks for the detailed response and the links. Since the deadline is
so close, I don't think I'll have enough time to properly research a
new project idea for FreeBSD. I was particularly interested in NUMA
support, so I wanted to work on that specifically.

I appreciate your help and hope to contribute to FreeBSD in the future.

Best regards,
Tanya

On Sat, Mar 28, 2026 at 1:36 AM Joseph Mingrone <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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/