We received a lot of amazing submissions for our summer Outreachy internship program and have accepted Dafna Hirschfeld to join us in creating new execution targets for Unikraft. Unikraft is a Xen Project incubation project that aims to simplify the process of building unikernels through a unified and customizable code base.
Currently, Unikraft supports building images that can be executed as a virtual machine on Xen and KVM, and as an ELF binary within the Linux user space environment. Support for more execution targets is done by providing more platform libraries that can be chosen during build. Dafna will be fairly free to choose a platform, perhaps based on familiarity or curiosity. Examples for platform choice include bare-metal, ARM, X86_64, VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and bhyve.
If you are unfamiliar with Outreachy, it provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities. Xen Project interns have later gone on to work at companies like Oracle, Google and Citrix.
In addition to Outreachy, we are excited to announce a few new interns that will be working on the Xen Project hypervisor through Google Summer of Code. Although the Xen Project was not a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code this year, FreeBSD and The Honeypot Project were and had a number of Xen Project related projects. Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development.
Interns that are a part of the Google Summer of Code and working on pushing Xen Project technologies forward include:
- Kristaps Civkulis who will be working on enabling the EFI loader to load FreeBSD Xen Dom0. There are two parts to the project – you can learn more about it here. The organization supporting this is the FreeBSD Project.
- Pratyush Yadav who will import the Xen grant-table bus_dma(9) handlers from OpenBSD. FreeBSD Project is supporting Pratyush.
- Lele Ma who will Port LibVMI to Xen MiniOS. In this project, the core functionalities of the LibVMI will be ported to Xen MiniOS. After ported, Xen MiniOS will have the basic capabilities of introspecting the memory of other guest virtual machines. Honeynet Project is supporting Lele.
Working in open source is a great way to start your career in technology. In a recent survey from HackerRank 84% of respondents (including CEOs, CTOs and company founders) said they look to an applicant’s GitHub project work as an indicator of a prospective employee’s on-the-job skills.
We want to thank everyone who applied to our Outreachy scholarship, and look forward to sharing the accomplishments of our interns. Welcome to open source!
