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+[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]]
+
+[[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable
+id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
+document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
+any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
+Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license
+is included in the section entitled [[GNU Free Documentation
+License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]
+
+
+# IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2012-07-19
+
+    <nowhere_man> well, I really actively started last week, so I'm ironing my
+      various use cases and above all I'm taking my barings in Hurd's code
+    <nowhere_man> I'm currently reading boot/ and pfinet/
+    <braunr> sorry for asking but
+    <braunr> can you describe brielfy what you mean to achieve
+    <braunr> i know it sounds weird but the project description is a bit vague
+      for me
+    <nowhere_man> OK
+    <nowhere_man> the main goal is to be able to easily spawn a subhurd that's
+      connected in some way to its host
+    <braunr> ok
+    <nowhere_man> mainly connected by network, possibly sharing resources like
+      FS
+    <braunr> is it similar in spirit with something like linux containers ?
+    <nowhere_man> IIRC about them, yes
+    <braunr> ok
+    <braunr> that will do for me then
+    <tschwinge> Yes, so not complete virtualization, but instaed limitied to
+      several components.
+    <braunr> lxc with more runtime features to increase/decrease the level of
+      isolation
+    <nowhere_man> at first it would be static, at creation time only
+    <braunr> ok, i clearly understand the proposal now :)
+    <braunr> what kind of help could you need in the near future ?
+    <braunr> (except permanent access to youpi's brain?)
+    <tschwinge> Yes, that's my question, too -- what can we do to "get this
+      thing going".
+    <nowhere_man> by monday or tuesday I should be clear on what I understand
+      or not in the code
+    <nowhere_man> I'm still a bit up to my elbows in it
+    <nowhere_man> at that point I'll be happy to be able to pop a lot of
+      questions about it
+    <braunr> so you'll be ready for the next meeting
+    <nowhere_man> yeah
+    <tschwinge> Please do as soon as there are questions that you cannot
+      resolve in a reasonably short amount of time.
+    <tschwinge> So often a quick hint from someone else already helps to ge
+      un-stuck.
+    <nowhere_man> OK
+    <tschwinge> There is no problem with asking for help given this huge and
+      convoluted code-base, where often design decisions are not obvious, too.
+    <nowhere_man> I will
+    <tschwinge> Good.  :-)
+    <antrik> nowhere_man: hm... what you said so far doesn't sound any
+      different than the work zhengda already did on boot years ago...
+    <antrik> (although none of it ever got upstream IIRC :-( )
+    <nowhere_man> antrik: wasn't aware of it, is there some code published?
+    <tschwinge> There are bits and pieces, but certainly there is enough work
+      left to be done, to put it all together.
+    <antrik> yes, his git repository should be up somewhere. it's quite
+      convoluted though, as he worked on several things, and also wasn't very
+      experienced with revision control in the beginning
+    <tschwinge> nowhere_man:
+      http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/community/gsoc/2008.html
+    <tschwinge> nowhere_man: http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/user/zhengda.html
+    <tschwinge> Second section of the latter one.
+    <antrik> well, my understanding of the proposal (and more or less what I
+      was driving at in the project idea, which is rather vague admittedly) is
+      something lighter than a real subhurd... rather some kind of thin
+      subenvironment that doesn't actually boot a complete system instance with
+      various daemons etc.
+    <tschwinge> nowhere_man: It is certainly valid for you to use pre-existing
+      code/patches, by the way.
+    <antrik> BTW, regarding the "full subhurd" thing, the missing pieces are
+      mostly virtual device implementations
+    <antrik> (that and some tough bug(s) remaining in zhengda's modified
+      boot...)
+    <nowhere_man> cool, I'll take a look
+    <antrik> in any case, getting a picture of the work zhengda did is, is
+      definitely the first thing to do :-)
+    <tschwinge> nowhere_man: I'll also try to locate some bits and stuff from
+      his verious repositories (I just fond a Subverision one; will convert to
+      Git).
+    <antrik> tschwinge: I'm pretty sure zhengda's git repository was converted
+      from the SVN one...
+    <tschwinge> antrik: Thanks for reminding us about this -- I failed to
+      remember all that.
+    <antrik> (which was in turn converted from CVS...)
+    <tschwinge> antrik: OK, will have a lot.
+    <tschwinge> Yeah, found a CVS tree, too.  ;-)
+    <antrik> BTW, zhengda's work more exactly was about subhurd without root
+      privileges. but that lays a lot of the groundwork for all kinds of more
+      flexible subhurd usage
+    <antrik> (but it's still quite a different thing that thing
+      subenvironments, so don't get confused...)
+    <antrik> err... thin subenvironments
+
+
+# IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2012-07-27
+
+    <nowhere_man> bddebian: I'm actually not progressing much while reading the
+      source, I'm jumping all over the place to grasp the various types and
+      functions used where I start
+    <nowhere_man> would there be a few starting points that could help me?
+    <tschwinge> nowhere_man: So what exactly is your status; what are you
+      doing, what do you need help with?  We surely can provide help, but need
+      to know where.
+    <nowhere_man> I'm starting from the source of boot/ and pfinet/ and as soon
+      as I encounter something that I don't understand, I find its definition
+    <nowhere_man> I'm kind of doing a depth-first search of what I need to
+      understand in the source code
+    <nowhere_man> I'm wondering if there are a few places in the source code
+      that I should start reading before anything else
+    <nowhere_man> well, I'll have to go in a few minutes
+    <nowhere_man> I'll continue my DFS ;-)
+
+
+# IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2012-08-02
+
+    <nowhereman> well, I made a leap forward in understanding the code, when I
+      stopped my DFS
+    <nowhereman> in hindsight, I'd say my way of approaching the code was
+      probably one of the worst possible
+    <braunr> oh
+    <tschwinge> OK, so at least you learned something, which is good.
+    <tschwinge> So, what's the new approach?  And what are you working on at
+      the moment
+    <tschwinge> ?
+    <nowhereman> I just remembered SICP, the idea of wishful thinking when you
+      code, and didn't bother with the fine details behind what I'm reading
+    <nowhereman> like, I don't really get what happens when a Mach port is
+      allocated, but I know approximately what a Mach port is
+    <tschwinge> So originally you worked on investigating all that, every line
+      of code?
+    <nowhereman> almost, yeah
+    <braunr> nowhereman: again, feel free to ask
+    <tschwinge> Yes indeed -- that's too complex for a single person to tackle
+      at one time.
+    <braunr> and quickly
+    <braunr> don't loose time
+    <tschwinge> Not even braunr and I have looked up all these things.
+      (Speaking for Richard here, but I'm quite sure he'll agree.  Perhaps he
+      has in fact looked up all the Mach things, though.)
+    <tschwinge> nowhereman: ufc?
+    <nowhereman> BTW, last week I wanted to push my description of how the tool
+      could be used, the use cases
+    <nowhereman> ufs
+    <nowhereman> but flubber is not online
+    <tschwinge> nowhereman: Oh, why ufs specifically?
+    <braunr> don't waste time on ufs
+    <braunr> really
+    <tschwinge> nowhereman: Yes, flubber is down.  But you can push directly to
+      the Savannah repository.
+    <tschwinge> nowhereman: Please immediatelly tell us if you're stuck on
+      something, like flubber not being available.
+    <tschwinge> We may not be able to help immediatelly, but we're the at least
+      aware of issues.
+    <braunr> and we may be able to help immediately :)
+    <tschwinge> As we're not sitting in a lab next to each other, we can't tell
+      otherwise what's going on.
+    <tschwinge> We may in fact even be able to tell you immediatelly to use
+      Savannah instead of flubber, indeed.
+    <tschwinge> nowhereman: So, back to ufs -- which you don't specifically
+      need to look at, I think -- ext2fs is what everyone uses.  But even there
+      you shouldn't really need to know many details/internals.
+    <nowhereman> OK, I was looking into it has it appears in hurd.boot
+    <tschwinge> Ah, OK.  Yeah, that's just an example/template, and should use
+      ext2fs nowadays.
+    <nowhereman> in fact, as far as FS are concerned, I suppose I will merely
+      need to know how to pass a port to the host's FS to some proxy FS in the
+      subhurd
+    <nowhereman> mmmh, Savannah only mentions a hurd.git
+    <tschwinge> Exactly that is the abstraction level you need, yes.
+    <nowhereman> I'm looking at http://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=hurd
+    <tschwinge> Yeah, that's a known shortcoming -- look here instead:
+      http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/hurd
+    <tschwinge> Here is some more up-to-date stuff on subhurds:
+      http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/subhurd.html
+    <tschwinge> nowhereman: You know how to tell git to add a new remote to
+      your web pages checkout and such stuff?
+    <nowhereman> yeah, no problem with that
+    <braunr> have you prepared any question to ask us ?
+    <nowhereman> the only I have now is if you can tell me where to look in the
+      code about passing Mach ports
+    <braunr> you don't pass ports, you pass rights
+    <braunr> http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/gnumach-doc/index.html is the
+      best location to have a look at
+    <braunr>
+      http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/gnumach-doc/Exchanging-Port-Rights.html#Exchanging-Port-Rights
+    <braunr> i suppose the mig doc will help too, as you may be using a higher
+      level interface to exchange rights
+    <braunr> be careful about user references on port rights
+    <braunr> deallocate releases a reference, it doesn't immediately destroy a
+      resource
+    <braunr> portinfo -v can help monitoring a task's rights
+    <braunr> nowhereman: so what are you planning to do now ?
+    <braunr> during the next week
+    <nowhereman> documenting what I understand from the boot process and where
+      things can be changed to fit my various use cases
+    <braunr> do you expect that to take the whole week ?
+    <nowhereman> and doing some first modifications to servers for the simplest
+      cases
+    <braunr> ok
+    <braunr> well i hope you're able to really start working on it soon, and
+      won't face weird issues in the meantime
+    <braunr> i'm a bit disappointed that you don't have more questions
+    <braunr> my feeling is you either did understand everything (except passing
+      port rights), or you didn't attempt to seriously understand the code
+    <braunr> or you don't dare ask questions
+    <braunr> this is something that must change
+    <braunr> or these meetings won't be as useful as they could be
+    <tschwinge> Yes.  But also please don't wait for the meetings, but ask
+      questions throughout the week, too.
+
+
+# IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2012-08-09
+
+    <nowhere_man> hey, does anyone knows the network device interface well?
+    <nowhere_man> I don't get it by reading net_io.c/h in gnumach
+    <braunr> nowhere_man: ask your question
+    <braunr> nowhere_man: http://www.sceen.net/~rbraun/pcap-hurd.c <- this may
+      help
+    <nowhere_man> I don't see what the entry point is
+    <nowhere_man> I finally understood that I actually don't need to touch
+      pfinet for gsoc project
+    <nowhere_man> but I should do a replacement network device instead
+    <nowhere_man> is the net_io_init function called at start?
+    <braunr> what entry point ?
+    <braunr> and you should perhaps have a look at the eth-multiplexer by
+      zhengda
+    <braunr> yes net_io_init is called at startup
+    <braunr> nowhere_man: did you find your answers about networking ?
+    <nowhere_man> no, I'm still digging in mach's code
+    <braunr> nowhere_man: well keep asking :/
+    <braunr> you left conversation without notice :/
+    <braunr> nowhere_man: and why mach ?
+    <nowhere_man> I thought hardware devices are there
+    <tschwinge> nowhere_man: You wanted to push your documentation one/two
+      weeks ago.  Why has that not yet happened?
+    <youpi> nowhere_man: they used to be there, they are now in netdde, but in
+      both case it's just a matter of the same RPC interface
+    <nowhere_man> tschwinge: I spent very few time this week on gsoc, and
+      completely forgot about the push on savannah
+    <braunr> nowhere_man: i told you to look at the work by zhengda concerning
+      eth-multiplexer, did you do that ?
+    <tschwinge> nowhere_man: You realize GSoC is meant to be a full-time job?
+    <tschwinge> Or, next to full-time?
+    <braunr> it's full-time normally
+    <braunr> the payment is justified by that
+    <youpi> nowhere_man: most RPC operations you need to know about network can
+      be seen at work in pfinet/ethernet.c, wherever "ether_port" appears
+    <youpi> i.e. device_open, set_filter, write, set/get_status
+    <braunr> again, http://www.sceen.net/~rbraun/pcap-hurd.c should guide you
+      pretty well
+    <braunr> since it's the very least necessary to use that interface
+    <tschwinge> nowhere_man: How, roughly but realistically, are your plans to
+      continue this task?
+    <tschwinge> nowhere_man: What has been blocking you this week so you
+      couldn't work on your task?
+    <nowhere_man> tschwinge: mostly a previous work that was supposed to end at
+      the beginning of the summer and only went online now, for which I'm
+      basically sysadmin
+    <braunr> 21:25 < tschwinge> nowhere_man: How, roughly but realistically,
+      are your plans to continue this task?
+    <braunr> this question is really more interesting actually
+    <nowhere_man> right now, I want to write a netword device that just sends
+      its frames by IPC
+    <braunr> why ?
+    <nowhere_man> as I never wrote any program using Mach's IPC, that seems the
+      easiest to get them right
+    <braunr> you won't have time
+    <braunr> 21:22 < braunr> nowhere_man: i told you to look at the work by
+      zhengda concerning eth-multiplexer, did you do that ?
+    <nowhere_man> braunr: not yet, no
+    <braunr> well that's your best chance to make some progress
+    <nowhere_man> braunr: is writing the virtal network device that hard?
+    <braunr> basically, it allows "bridgind" the pfinet instances of various
+      subhurds
+    <braunr> the virtual network device you want *is* eth-multiplexer
+    <tschwinge> nowhere_man: GSoC is nearly over.  That's why I'm asking how
+      this task is going to continue.  I'm sorry but I reckon you have not
+      spend anywhere near the amount of hours that are meant to be spent on it.
+    <braunr> and from what antrik told me, yes it's hard, and moreover, why
+      rewrite it if it already exists and you're late
+    <braunr> i agree
+    <nowhere_man> tschwinge: I know, I've started way too late because of my
+      second round of exams
+    <tschwinge> nowhere_man: OK, that's how you started.  But how is it going
+      to continue...
+    <nowhere_man> tschwinge: in short, I write a prototype that just starts a
+      subhurd, and when that works correctly I add the network
+    <tschwinge> nowhere_man: I mean from an organizational point of view.
+    <nowhere_man> well, between now and the beginning of september, I'll work
+      full-time on this
+    <nowhere_man> up until september 8th
+
+
+# IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2012-08-09
+
+    <antrik> nowhere_man: you do *not* have to do a replacement network
+      device. zhengda did that years ago.
+    <antrik> nowhere_man: also note that zhengda also implemented the support
+      for *using* the virtual network device (in fact any replacement devices
+      -- except that no others actually exist yet) in boot
+    <youpi> which is already in, actually, isn't it?
+    <antrik> youpi: hm, yes... it was the patch that zhengda posted on the list
+      once, but later updated, and at some later point you merged the outdated
+      variant from the list...
+    <youpi> outdated?
+    <youpi> ah, but he never posted the updated one, and it got lost in git
+      repos, right?
+    <youpi> (what was updated actually?)
+    <antrik> he changed the option name and description later for more
+      clarity. don't remember whether there were other changes
+    <antrik>   -f, --device=device_name=device_file
+    <antrik>                              Specify a device file used by subhurd
+      and its
+    <antrik>                              virtual name.
+    <antrik> that's the one from the Debian package
+    <antrik>   -m, --device-map=DEBICENAME=DEVICEFILE
+    <antrik>                              Map the device in subhurd to the
+      device in the
+    <antrik>                              main Hurd.
+    <antrik> that's the one I have locally built from his tree
+    <youpi> so you actually have access to his tree?
+    <antrik> uhm... I used to... it was on flubber
+
+
+# IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2012-08-18
+
+    <nowhere_man> so, this week I discovered how fun it is to work on a
+      non-mainstream OS
+    <nowhere_man> I hoped to start coding the tool itself, put together the
+      skeleton, but every Lisp implementation I tried had problems
+    <braunr> ah you want to write it in lisp ?
+    <nowhere_man> ECL, that I had ported a few years ago, actually FTBFS since
+    <nowhere_man> I hoped to be able, it would be easier for me
+    <nowhere_man> and when I tried Scheme, I started with Guile (it's GNU's own
+      Scheme implementation, after all)
+    <nowhere_man> and when I execute the FFI functions, to access functions in
+      libmachdec
+    <nowhere_man> I get SIGILL
+    <braunr> i can't advise you about anything lisp related
+    <braunr> the most reliable thing you'll find on the hurd is C
+    <nowhere_man> I tried to debug that, but running Guile in GDB gets me a
+      SIGSEV
+    <nowhere_man> I'll try to make ECL to build again
+    <braunr> this seems like a waste of time to me
+    <braunr> avoid spending time on anything that isn't directly related to
+      your goal if you still hope to finish it
+    <nowhere_man> I'm ten times more comfortable coding in Lisp
+    <braunr> it doesn't matter, you're late
+    <nowhere_man> yeah, I know, so taking the time to correct that problem
+      won't change the fact that I won't finish in time
+    <nowhere_man> so I'll finish anyway, and in Lisp
+    <braunr> and if you lack something else, like some mach/hurd specific lisp
+      bindings, you'll have to spend more time on that
+    <braunr> ok
+    <nowhere_man> do you know if someone had a SIGILL situation on Hurd in the
+      past?
+    <nowhere_man> I'm wondering if that's a known kind of issue
+    <braunr> there are lots of issues
+    <braunr> especially when it comes to other languages and runtime
+      environments
+    <nowhere_man> but is it like MAX_PATH_LEN, something that is known to
+      happen when porting something on Hurd?
+    <braunr> i'm not sure how comparable it is
+    <braunr> i'd say it's often before of the conformance issues of the hurd
+    <braunr> because*
+    <nowhere_man> like missing bits of POSIX ?
+    <braunr> or simple wrong for some corner cases
+    <braunr> simply*
+    <bubu^> nowhere_man, I was able to run guile on my hurd image through qemu
+    <bubu^> but I didn't make any complexe programms to check if everything
+      works fine
+    <nowhere_man> yeah, it runs fine
+    <nowhere_man> FFI functions get you a SIGILL
+    <nowhere_man>
+      http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Dynamic-FFI.html
+    <nowhere_man> the define-module form at the beginning triggers the signal
+    <antrik> nowhere_man: what do you want to implement in Lisp?
+    <antrik> BTW, the guy working on Lisp bindings a couple of years ago used
+      Clisp
+    <antrik> it was working back then
+    <nowhere_man> antrik: the program that sets up a subhurd
+    <nowhere_man> I always forget about clisp, I'll try it right away
diff --git a/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn b/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn
index 8ce10ffa..9d486b00 100644
--- a/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn
+++ b/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
-[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 Free Software Foundation,
-Inc."]]
+[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Free Software
+Foundation, Inc."]]
 
 [[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable
 id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
@@ -87,6 +87,7 @@ other: language_bindings, gnat, gccgo, perl_python.  -->
 [[!inline pages="community/gsoc/project_ideas/tcp_ip_stack" show=0 feeds=no actions=yes]]
 [[!inline pages="community/gsoc/project_ideas/nfs" show=0 feeds=no actions=yes]]
 [[!inline pages="community/gsoc/project_ideas/pthreads" show=0 feeds=no actions=yes]]
+[[!inline pages="community/gsoc/project_ideas/smp" show=0 feeds=no actions=yes]]
 [[!inline pages="community/gsoc/project_ideas/sound" show=0 feeds=no actions=yes]]
 [[!inline pages="community/gsoc/project_ideas/disk_io_performance" show=0 feeds=no actions=yes]]
 [[!inline pages="community/gsoc/project_ideas/vm_tuning" show=0 feeds=no actions=yes]]
diff --git a/community/gsoc/project_ideas/smp.mdwn b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/smp.mdwn
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..e17c2ccf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/smp.mdwn
@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]]
+
+[[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable
+id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
+document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
+any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
+Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license
+is included in the section entitled [[GNU Free Documentation
+License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]
+
+[[!meta title="SMP"]]
+
+
+# IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2012-09-30
+
+    <braunr> i expect smp to be our next gsoc project