Meet the 2022 FreeBSD Google Summer of Code Students: Christos Margiolis

The FreeBSD Project is proud to have participated in the Google Summer of Code program since its inception in 2005. At the completion of the 2022 season, the Foundation asked a few of our GSoC students to share more about themselves and their experience working with the Project.

Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself and where you are in your education journey.

I’m a Computer Engineering student from Greece entering my 4th year.

Q: Have you ever worked with Google Summer of Code before?

Yes. GSOC 2021 on FreeBSD again.

Q: Why did you want to work with FreeBSD again?

Multiple reasons:

– FreeBSD is my main operating system.
– I’m familiar with its codebase.
– I was a contributor outside of GSOC already.
– It was the only project I had a genuine and practical interest for.

Q: Please tell us a little about your Google Summer of Code project.

I implemented a new DTrace provider (kinst) which allows for instruction-level tracing, that is, it can trace any instruction in a given kernel function, compared to FBT, which can trace only the entry and return points of a function.

Q: What have you learned from this experience?

That amd64 is complicated.

Q: How has working with the FreeBSD Project been?

Excellent. Communication with my mentor Mark Johnston (markj@) has been great, especially in times when I was about to throw my computer out the window, because of bugs I could have never found the solution to.