Simon's Musings

November 3, 2008

AFS Hackathon and Google Summer of Code

Filed under: Uncategorized — sxw @ 7:35 pm
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I’m now back in Scotland, having spent the last week in California, courtesy of the very nice people at Google’s Open Source Program’s office and OpenAFS. As previously mentioned, I spent the summer mentoring a student (Dragos Tatulea) who was adding support for read-write disconnection to OpenAFS. The mentoring process was hugely rewarding – from a standing start Dragos learned a huge amount about a very complex codebase, and produced a workable implementation of disconnected operation which is now part of the OpenAFS tree. Whilst mentoring was both challenging and time consuming, it also encouraged me to rapidly learn about bits of the OpenAFS codebase I’d never delved into before, and lots about Linux kernel development that I’d been trying to avoid ever knowing!

So, Google invited OpenAFS to nominate people from their Summer of Code mentoring team to attend a summit at their Mountain View headquarters, and I was kindly included. Derrick, Jeff and Matt from OpenAFS also came along. My bags also eventually joined me!

The mentors summit its self was an eye-opening experience. Organised as an un-conference, where people were encouraged to arrange sessions on topics and technologies that interested them, there was a huge amount of fascinating information, and many useful relationships created and renewed. In particular, a chance demonstration at the session talking about Android introduced me to Gerrit, a web based code review tool. I firmly hope that gerrit will be part of the OpenAFS development process, just as soon as we get moved over to git.

Immediately following the Summer of Code mentor’s conference, Google hosted an AFS hackathon – a chance for a collection of OpenAFS developers to get together, discuss the current state of our world, and make targetted progress on specific items. Much of the discussion here centered upon moving forwards on a few specific areas – the move from CVS to git, the integration of rxk5 and Hartmut’s OSD work, and the ongoing work on forming an foundation, and creating a standardisation process. 

I also spent half a day looking at improving the AFS user experience on the Nokia n810. Unfortunately the Hildon file manager widget which both the n810 file browser and all native applications use has some features that make it particularly unfriendly for network file systems. Firstly, it does all of its processing in a single thread, so file system operations which block for a long time also hang the user interface of the application. Secondly, it’s not particularly aware of ‘expensive’ operations – for example, when you open a directory it will also open all of the sub directories, and work out how many files are in them by stating every file, in every sub directory. Needless to say the performance of this is very poor when the directory you are opening is /afs.

I also spent time on bringing up a test instance of gerrit, and working up some proposals of how this could be integrated into the OpenAFS patch workflow. Whilst this is still blocked on the work on the git migration (which Max and Mike made significant progress on over the 2 days), hopefully we’ll be in a position to start using it in anger soon.

Despite the best efforts of the fog at LAX, and American Airlines, I also made it back to Scotland!

Theme: Rubric.