May 31, 2017

At the beginning of May we embarked on a new path in the FreeBSD Foundation, with the hiring of co-operative education (co-op) students from the University of Waterloo. The University of Waterloo is a pioneer and leader in co-operative education, with 100% of Engineering students and a majority of Computer Science students participating in co-op programs.

We have two students joining us for the summer: Siva Mahadevan, a third-year Computer Science (CS) student, and Guangyuan (Charlie) Yang, a second-year student also in CS. Siva’s first project was a Tinderbox-style dashboard view for the FreeBSD Jenkins Continuous Integration (CI) system, which is now deployed and can be seen at https://ci.freebsd.org/tinderbox/. It presents a high-level overview of the build status for FreeBSD across release branches and architecture ports. Siva is currently working on integrating msdosfs (FAT) file system support into the makefs tool.

Charlie also started with a Continuous Integration project, with a goal of investigating FreeBSD on the ARM-based BeagleBone Green. It’s now running in our Kitchener office, and a quick glance provides an overview of the current build status. In fact, as I write this I see a lot of red — time to find out who broke the build!

You can read more about Charlie’s project here.

Siva and Charlie will be at BSDCan 2017 in Ottawa next month, so stop by the FreeBSD Foundation booth and let them tell you about their experience with FreeBSD. You’ll hear more from Siva and Charlie over the next three months.

— Contributed by Ed Maste