Open Projects

Welcome Summer of Code (SOC) Students and fellow hackers. Peruse our projects and see what interests you. If you have questions ask them on the Wiki talk page or the RTEMS mailing list. If you plan to submit a proposal to do something for the RTEMS Project as part of a SOC we require that you demonstrate that you have a basic RTEMS development environment installed as part of the application process; ask questions if you need help getting there. See Getting Started for SoC Students for details on what we want you to have done. Most of all we want you to succeed and have fun on an RTEMS related project.

RTEMS projects span kernel hacking, improving the development environment, developing test cases and test suites, and more. If you like one of the ideas, you can pitch in and tackle it. If you are interested in one of these projects but are not able to code and test it yourself, consider sponsoring one of the core RTEMS developers to do it for you. Volunteering or sponsoring is how things get done -- users keep RTEMS development alive!

Overview

We do not provide time estimates on these because the time depends on the experience and skill of the developer. Most of these projects will fall between a few weeks and a few months of effort by a person who is familiar with the general use of GNU/Linux and GNU tools. Some of these projects may consist of multiple steps. In this case, each step is defined to fall into short discrete steps.

Many RTEMS projects are done as student or volunteer efforts in a person's spare time or as a hobby. This means it is imperative that projects be either relatively small or divided into steps that can be completed and committed to the main RTEMS code repository. Thus we have lots of experience in defining useful projects that are sized to be doable and useful to the community in relatively small work packages, or we try to identify projects that we think are beyond the scope of an SOC.

Most of the projects are feasible as a Summer of Code project. Since some projects have multiple steps, students should work with prospective mentors to size up how many of those steps to undertake. Similarly, some projects might be a starting point for a thesis or dissertation.

The projects on this page are lumped into broad categories but there is no prioritization applied to the order; we have identified some high priority projects (or project areas) that can help guide you if you are at a loss of what might be interesting to work on. The order of projects in the list does not reflect their importance, difficulty, or feasibility. It is just an organized dump of ideas with enough details to give an outline of the effort required. If you are interested in doing one, a core developer will be happy to augment the description or development plan.

Our project list is not exclusive: if you have an idea that is not listed don't hesitate to ask people in the RTEMS community if they think your idea is good and propose it if so. If developers are working on something similar to what you propose they may be less likely to accept your proposal. Ask on the project's mailing list or IRC channel; many developers sit in IRC and check it (and their email) infrequently throughout the day so if it takes awhile for your question to be answered don't give up!

If you have a new project add it to the appropriate list below, link to a wiki page that follows the recommended Open Project Template?, and briefly (1-2 sentences) summarize the project and how it will improve RTEMS.

High Priority Projects

These projects have generated a lot of interest from users and are greatly desired. Most of these are large or ongoing projects that should be broken into manageable subtasks that may constitute reasonable sized projects themselves. Definitely ask before proposing to do any of these projects.

• Improvements to SMP support? - Multiprocessing is of increasing importance in modern systems and we want RTEMS to remain competitive and useful.
• Test Coverage Analysis? - Improve coverage by adding more test cases. Eliminating dead code and reaching 100% coverage helps reduce the likelihood of new and recurrent bugs.
• Update the RTEMS TCP/IP stack? - The networking stack is old and showing it. This project has some volunteer activity. The effort requires providing support functional equivalents of multiple BSD kernel constructs. The following is a very short list of them. This project may be too large for a SOC.
  • Bus Space API?. Supercore namespace RTEMS-specific API in the spirit of the ​BSD bus_space API. This project may be too large for a SOC.

• RTEMS Toolkits - We are defining collections of libraries and support programs which make it easier to get started for certain types of applications. The first of these if the RTEMS Graphics Toolkit. We haven't identified all potential toolkits or identified candidate components. Each potential component must be evaluated for license and appropriateness for use in an embedded environment like RTEMS. Here are the toolkits areas identified so far:
  • RTEMS Database Toolkit - This toolkit would include ports of packages like BSD dbm, [www.sqlite.org/ SQLite], ​Constant Database (CDB), and ​TinyCDB - a Constant DataBase to RTEMS
  • RTEMS Configuration Toolkit - porting configuration file parsing libraries like ​libConfuse
  • RTEMS Science Toolkit - we anticipate there must be libraries of generate use. The GNU Scientific Library (GSL) has been ported but does not meet RTEMS Project licensing requirements.

Small or Class Appropriate Projects

These are small projects that could be tackled by anyone. They are mostly projects which can easily be nibbled on in small work units. They may require no coding or modest coding skill. Some of these will require the ability to read code and analyse it. Some of these will be good projects to tackle in an "Introduction to FOSS" class or as a class project by a student. Individual tasks may also be useful for those new to RTEMS and looking to try a simple project to learn the ropes. See Small Projects for details.

Active Projects

This section lists open projects that are actively being worked on, for example by summer of code students.

• File System Test Suite
• POSIX Timing Tests?
• ISO9660 file system
• RTEMS port of the GNU Java Compiler (gjc)
• Add support for gcov output? to covoar so tools like gcov and lcov can be used with RTEM.

RTEMS Testing

• POSIX Compliance Test Suite?
• Add support for gcov output to covoar
• Add support for gprof output to covoar?

Development Environment Oriented

N/A

Third Party Packages

• Compiling RTEMS with CLANG.

RTEMS Testing

Testing a large body of software like RTEMS is in a continual state of improvement. There is always a need for more test cases and easier ways to run them all and decode the results. In addition, we want to be able to run all tests on as many hardware and simulator configurations as possible. Testing doesn't sound exciting to most people but when you combine the breadth of what we need to test with our desire for 100% instruction and branch path coverage, you get some very interesting and challenging work.

Some of the identified activities which would augment our testing capabilities are listed here:

• Sixty-Four Bit Timestamps
• Test the POSIX FIFO Implementation?.

Development Environment Oriented

Remember that RTEMS is a real-time operating system targeting embedded applications. Applications are cross-compiled on a development host to produce executables that are transferred to and executed on target systems. The projects in this section are more focused on the host side of that equation. This means they will run on GNU/Linux or MS-Windows and possibly communicate with embedded hardware.

RTEMS is a free real-time operating system that must compete against commercial closed source offerings that have very impressive looking GUI oriented Development Environments. The RTEMS Project has spent years honing RTEMS and tuning it to be a competitive run-time and it certainly the technical capabilities to compete. But often RTEMS gets dinged for not having a "pretty face". Some of the projects in this category address that deficiency.

The following areas have been identified for projects related to GUI development environments:

• Improvements in the RTEMS Eclipse Integration
• Implement a cross-platform Application Configuration GUI.
• Integration of RTEMS cross development environment into eVisual Studio?
• ArgoUML RTEMS Support?

RTEMS Run-Time Oriented

The projects in this category are more focused on the development of software that runs on RTEMS on target hardware.

Run-Time Projects Not Initiated

The following projects have no work on them.

• Unified Interrupt and PCI APIs -- UnifiedAPIs?
• Use Maps or Hashes? in the implementation of Classic API Notepads and POSIX API Keys.
• RTEMS can always use more BSPs for Simulators?. Being able to test, debug, and perform coverage analysis on simulators is critical to the ongoing success of the project.
• Identify and implement the functionality currently missing in dup()
• Implement a Simple Line Editor. Existing code can be refactored for starting point.
• RTEMS System Events is a project to add a first class object for events. Currently all event sets are tied to a specific thread.
• Implement OSEK Support ​http://portal.osek-vdx.org/
• Port Transparent IPC (​http://tipc.sourceforge.net/index.html) to RTEMS
• Support for new Processor Families - Xtensa, Cortex/Thumb?-2, Microblaze
• Add cache manager support for architectures not having it.
• Investigate the feasibility of implementing applicable sections of the ​IEC 61131 standard to enable RTEMS-enabled hardware to act as a ​Programmable Logic Controller. More information on the IEC 61131 standard can be found at ​http://www.plcopen.org/ . ​http://www.beremiz.org/ is an open source framework for automation that may be a useful starting point.
• Refactor the filesystem infrastructure
• Bdbuf improvements
• ARINC653 API support within RTEMS ARINC653API?

Run-Time Projects With Some Work

The following projects have had some work on them but are not complete. The remaining activities could be large or small:

• Paravirtualization? of RTEMS to make it suitable to be run as a guest OS in a hypervisor.
• MMU Support? for RTEMS.
• TinyRTEMS is an umbrella term that corresponds to any activities or ideas that could shrink the code and data space requirements for RTEMS. The goal is to progressively lower the minimum CPU requirements.
• Improve the RTEMS SuperCore Scheduler? - near complete
• more NIC device drivers?

Projects Whose Page Need Updating

The following projects have been worked on and the pages require updating. There may or may not be enough work remaining to constitute a Summer of Code project. If you are interested in one of these, please ask on the mailing list or IRC.

• Implement POSIX Asynchronous and List IO?
• Run-Time Tracing? - includes gathering, capturing, and displaying information to the user.
• RTEMS Sequenced Initialization is a project to allow RTEMS initialization to be dynamically constructed based upon user requirements. It would be like C++ global constructors conceptually.
• Dynamic Object File Loading is an important feature for many types of embedded applications. It lets you have a base application with RTEMS which dynamically loads the rest of the application. The dynamic parts can be optional features and never loaded. Plus they are more easily upgraded than an entire application image.
• port BSD USB stack
• Parrot On RTEMS
• RTEMS port of GNU GCC Go?

Third Party Packages

This is a list of projects related to third party free and open source software and its support for RTEMS. The following project areas have been identified:

• See the RTEMS Graphics Toolkit for current status of the kit and ideas for future work.
• Integrate CEXP? into main RTEMS distribution.
• Mono On RTEMS?
• Turn the current port of LWIP into a first class citizen. Submit port, make target independent, etc.
• IDL/COM? Support for RTEMS.
• OpenLDAP slapd server

The following projects are about general improvements to the development environment.

• Improve Testing of the GNU Tools? on RTEMS targets
• GDB Python Script support for RTEMS

There are host operating systems which do not have prebuilt RTEMS tools available. These projects are about addressing that need:

• Complete implementation of Debian Packages?.
• Prebuilt MacOS tools?

Obsolete Projects

Some projects have been proposed that are viewed as being of minor use. This list is meant to provide a way to avoid wasted effort on projects that are not widely desired. However, projects on this list might still be useful to someone, given a motivated individual to work on them.

• Various ideas have been proposed related to using RTEMS as a hypervisor?.
• Merge BSP for Simplescalar simulator?
• ​Rosetta OS OS Independent Device Driver API?
• Implement current version of µITRON Interface ​http://www.www.tron.org/index-e.html