Github Sponsorship

[Waldek Kozaczuk]

Hi,

As some of you know, I have been contributing to the OSv project since around 2016. In this time I have contributed over 300 patches (many trivial ones:-), I know). Of those, the most notable one involved enhancing OSv to run on AWS firecracker. I have also cut 5 latest releases and reviewed many patches. I also try to contribute to Capstan if I can.

Believe it or not, I actually have a day job that has nothing with to do with my OSv development. So contributing to OSv is my time-off hobby and I must say I enjoy it thoroughly.

OSv was originally written by Cloudius Systems (now ScyllaDB). Many original contributors, including my virtual mentor over the last 4 years - Nadav Har'El,  still respond on the mailing list, write and review patches which I very much appreciate. But now OSv development it is pretty much pure open-source non-commercial endeavor. To that end, I have seen an uptick in contributions from many new contributors which truly excites me. Probably the most notable recent ones aimed to implement VitrtioFS support have come from Fotis Xenakis. 

Why am I writing all this? Recently I have joined Github sponsorship to see if any of you might be interested in sponsoring me through this program. In earnest, I am nor looking for much money or enough to make my living but maybe earn a little to pay bills associated with my OSv experiments for example requiring access to ASW i3 instances or something like that.

In any case, if you value my contributions you might consider sponsoring my future work on OSv. To that end, I have set up 3 levels of contributions on Github where you can decide which level you are comfortable (if at all) to sponsor me at - https://github.com/sponsors/wkozaczuk. If you think I should adjust those levels or change something, please let me know. I appreciate your support,

If you decide to sponsor let me tell you what I am planning to work in next year or so:

• Finish ongoing musl 1.1.24/1.2.1 upgrade
  • You must have seen many recent patches related to it
  • This effort is key to improve AArch64 port and possibly allow for later RISC-V port
• Modularization/"Librarization"
  
  • See the discussion - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/osv-dev/BHwN6Stm3n4/arvdOwl3AAAJ
  • Hide most symbols in the kernel
    • Issue #97 - Be more selective on symbols exported from the kernel
    • See related discussion - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/osv-dev/fs-jmyaXY_E/vWUk-wDDAAAJ
  • Reduce kernel size:
    • See the discussion - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/osv-dev/hCYGRzytaJ4/D23S_ibNAgAJ and https://groups.google.com/d/msg/osv-dev/JsJfnhTX_EY/PKUvYm9-AQAJ
  • Expose C++ APIs as C to hide C++ completely 
• Improve AArch64 support
  
  • Get to the point where most unit tests including Java pass
• Merge ipv6 branch master
  • Also, reach out to Spirent to see if any more networking related bugs fixed can be brought over from the https://github.com/SpirentOrion/osv fork
• Help review and merge "lazy-allocated stack" patch - see https://groups.google.com/g/osv-dev/c/tZnwiScmjZY/m/GkY0hV9EAwAJ 
• Improve tooling
  • Improve capstan
    • Better support QEMU on OSX (new accelerators)
    • Support pulling artifacts from GitHub nightly releases repo
    • Support running Firecracker, QEMU microvm
    • Support Virtio-FS
  • Create IntelliJ, Maven and or Gradle plugins to deploy Java, Node, etc apps
  • Run Docker images on OSv (possibly musl-based like Alpine are better)
    • There is already an existing example - https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv-apps/tree/master/openjdk12-jre-from-docker
• Other finer-level things
  • Test newer runtimes
    • Golang >= 1.13
    • Java > 12
    • DENO 1.0
  • Support .NET Core executables
    • See what needs to be finished in this thread - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/osv-dev/k69cHw7qvTg/9NqPq70IAwAJ
  • Refresh look and feel of http://osv.io
  • Optimize memory allocator to better deal with "small" amount of memory - https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv/issues/1013
  • #28 - Optimize atomic operations on UP (single-VCPU)
  • #1016 - Add support for smb2/3 (samba) file system T
    • There is already a patch sent to the list - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/osv-dev/QToC22-QHiA/ejSOMGe7BwAJ
  • #1009 - Make ZFS optional as a shared library
  • #212 - Support static executables
  • #1069 - Add vsock support
  • #1041 - Idea for easily creating OSv images from a list of Ubuntu packages
  • Fix networking bugs
    • https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv/issues/420
    • https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv/issues/454
  • Speedup VFS - https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv/issues/450
  • Improve XEN support
    • https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv/issues/498
    • https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv/issues/345
  • Speed-up realloc() by mremap() - https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv/issues/184
  • Investigate virtio-net “slow path” - https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv/issues/177

Regards,

Waldemar Kozaczuk