[GSoC 2017] Original proposal: Port kernel Lua to FreeBSD

[Pedro Giffuni]

[Please don't include soc-admin for project proposals: the list is 
exclusively for administrative purposes.]


On 2/27/2017 8:28 AM, Saurav Sachidanand wrote:
> Hello FreeBSD community,
>
> I'm
> ​ Saurav Sachidanand, and I'm​
>  a CS sophomore studying in India
> ​.
>  I have an interest in operating systems development and wish to 
> contribute to the FreeBSD community. I'm proficient with C and have 
> some experience in kernel programming. Hence, I'd like to propose an 
> original project for GSoC 2017 that I feel would benefit this community.
>
> In past years, the Lua interpreter was ported to run inside the Linux 
> and NetBSD kernel [1]. Lua was chosen because it's interpreter is very 
> small (~240 KB) compared to that of Python or Ruby, it's MIT licensed, 
> and is almost freestanding. A working demonstration of it is a packet 
> filtering algorithm written entirely in kernel Lua [2].
>
> Specifically, my proposal would be to port the following that are 
> currently written for NetBSD:

I think a FreeBSD developer (wkozek?) already did this  some time ago. I 
do recall seeing the code somewhere in github.

I don't mean to discourage you but I think the NetBSD guys haven't found 
much uses for the Lua module so the justification for working on this 
would have to find a real use.

There was also a suggestion in the NetBSD lists to use Lua for the 
kernel debugger (ddb) and in their firewall (NPF) but AFAICT those don't 
really depend on the kernel module.

Pedro.