Hi,
On Thu, Mar 01, 2012 at 09:58:13AM +0100, Norman Feske wrote:
That said, I am uncertain about the motivation you gave. From a student's point of view, our needs at Genode Labs may not provide enough incentive to go for it. If I were a student, I would prefer working on a topic that is somehow related to my personal (or more general) needs.
You're right, what I wrote are _my professional_ needs. My personal need that definitely overlaps with other developers is: privacy. IMO this shall be a strong motivation factor in the present computing world as it is for the whole Genode project.
One way of making this topic more convincing may be to take block-level encryption just as a concrete example to work on, but define the topic in a more general way. For example "cryptography on Genode". By framing the topic this way, the student can explore many interesting technologies (e.g., random-number generators, OpenSSL, GnuTLS, SSH, GnuGPG) in the context of Genode. The implementation of the block encryption component would be merely a side effect.
Two remarks about the two components of your paragraph:
* If I understand you correctly, you propose to broaden the topic to anything related to cryptography in Genode, which I'd like to avoid. The tasks for summer should be tailored for the expected time frame and also address a specific topic. Additionally, we should keep the trailing remark about our openness to proposals.
* I don't think block-device encryption can be solved as a side effect as it must be investigated thoroughly and implemented with care. The history of LUKS and its predecessors for example spans over years.
I would not rule them out. If there is someone who is highly interested in working on a sophisticated topic such as Intel Wireless support and already has a track record in working on similar things, we should try to accommodate him/her by providing test hardware. But for a student without a clear skill set, I would propose a topic that does not involve such additional expenses. I.e., a topic that can be carried out natively on Linux or on Qemu.
Agree.
Regards