Re: Interested in NUMA for GSoC and looking for mentorship

I would think a bigger need is support for scheduling
on heterogenous cores (performance/efficiency/low power
efficiency cores). Can this effort benefit from GSOC?

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Scheduler/Hybrid

> On Mar 28, 2026, at 10:25 AM, Tanya Agarwal <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 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/
>