October 7, 2022
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 am a student of graduate school of the university of Tokyo in Japan. I major in computer science and the theme for my research is the security of IoT devices.
Q: Have you ever worked with Google Summer of Code before?
No, I haven’t.
Q: Why did you want to work with FreeBSD?
I have been interested in UNIX since it is one of the oldest operating systems, and it creates the general form of lots of operating systems that exist these days. Therefore, I wanted to be involved in the development of FreeBSD, which is historically similar to UNIX and has strengths in stability and robustness as a characteristic. I believe it would be meaningful for me to be involved in the development of a part of the actual OS.
Q: Please tell us a little about your Google Summer of Code project.
I am working on “Linuxulator on powerpc64”. This project aims to implement the functionalities to run Linux binaries on FreeBSD on powerpc64 architecture. This has already been achieved for amd64, arm64, and i386, but not for powerpc64.
Q: What have you learned from this experience?
I’ve learned how I should contribute to a huge source code. It was hard for me to find the cause of each bug at the beginning since the source code of the FreeBSD is too enormous. However, Justin helped me a lot and I gradually get used to determining the cause by thinking logically.
Q: How has working with the FreeBSD Project been?
Good. Since there were some non-trivial bugs at the beginning, it was very hard for me to make a good start, but now, I am learning a lot about Linux and FreeBSD day by day and it is very interesting.
