1 files changed, 35 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/community/gsoc/project_ideas/vm_tuning.mdwn b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/vm_tuning.mdwn
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..79361189
--- /dev/null
+++ b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/vm_tuning.mdwn
@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+[[meta copyright="Copyright © 2008, 2009 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="VM Tuning"]]
+
+Hurd/[[microkernel/Mach]] presently make very bad use of the available physical memory in the
+system. Some of the problems are inherent to the system design (the kernel
+can't distinguish between important application data and discardable disk
+buffers for example), and can't be fixed without fundamental changes. Other
+problems however are an ordinary lack of optimisation, like extremely crude
+heuristics when to start paging. (See <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2007-08/msg00034.html> for example.)
+Many parameters are based on assumptions from
+a time when typical machines had like 16 MiB of RAM, or simply have been set to
+arbitrary values and never tuned for actual use.
+
+The goal of this project is to bring the virtual memory management in Hurd/Mach
+closer to that of modern mainstream kernels (Linux, FreeBSD), by comparing the
+implementation to other systems, implementing any worthwhile improvements, and
+general optimisation/tuning. It requires very good understanding of the Mach
+VM, and virtual memory in general.
+
+This project is related to [[GNU_Savannah_task 5489]].
+
+Possible mentors: ?
+
+Exercise: Make some modification to the existing VM code. You could try to find
+a piece of code that can be improved with simple code optimization, for
+example.