I'll be spending my winter as an Outreachy intern with the Linux Kernel organization :)
Outreachy is a 3-month long paid internship program.
It runs twice a year(May & December cohorts) & is aimed at people who face under-representation
in tech. Different open source and open science organizations come together under the Outreachy
umbrella each round to offer projects and mentors from their communities.
My name is Soumya and I'm interested in System Software. My venture into Operating Systems is fairly recent. I took an OS course in undergrad which was mostly theoretical, compiled my first kernel & completed a few basic assignments(writing a barebones bootloader, a simple kernel module etc). It was quite different from the programming I had done until then...tough, but engaging.
I remember the first time I looked up Linux source code on kernel.org. I came across the git trees in the archives, was utterly confused by the lack of code files...and moved on. A few years later, I took another OS course in grad school that had a lot more coding. It was so much more intense as well. I liked the work and started looking for ways to get into kernel development.
Which brings us back to Outreachy! If I'm not wrong, the Linux community participates in every cohort. I had heard of Outreachy long before I actually applied. In fact, I don't even remember how many years back I registered on their website. But I'm very happy that I did. This wasn't the first time I applied, but it was the first time I was accepted. And those kernel archives do make sense to me now:)
My core values are:
#1
Perseverance. Because life and career are not always going to flow smoothly. Discipline, growth, motivation and possibly everything else will fluctuate. Having the resolve to roll through it all is important to keep moving forward.
#2
Being respectful of others.
My Project: "Improve i915 sysfs implementation"
Andi Shyti and Karolina Stolarek will be mentoring me on this project.
I'll be working on improving the implementation of sysfs in the i915 driver. i915 is the driver that provides support for Intel Graphics on Linux systems (think GPUs). It was first added in Linux 2.6.9-rc2 for the Intel 915G chipset. Support for other chipset families was added to the same driver while the driver name remained the same.
Modern GPU architectures are no longer monolithic and some GPU platforms are divided into tiles (GTs). The i915 driver caters to different Intel GPU devices. The main aim of the project is to refactor the power management structure in drivers/gpu/drm/i915/gt/intel_gt_sysfs_pm.c such that the code for general GPU and tiles is split. The changes will be tested using the IGT suite.
Technical details coming up in the next post!
