GSoC 2015. lowRISC "Porting musl libc to RISC-V" project.

[Roma Titov <titovroman@gmail.com>]

Hello, musl.

My name is Roman.
I'm this-semester-graduading (bachelor) student from Russia, and I 
think I could be the candidate for subject. (lowRISC GSoC ideas: 
http://www.lowrisc.org/docs/gsoc-2015-ideas/)


I already have some discussion with lowRISC developers on their mailing 
list, and this message is composed from pieces of that conversation.
(resending it here is, definetily, not a good idea, lowRISC archive is 
here: 
http://listmaster.pepperfish.net/pipermail/lowrisc-dev-lists.lowrisc.org/)

My main worry for now is that I can't reach Rich Felker (dalias at 
libc.org) who is a mentor for this project. I wrote directy to him few 
days ago, and lowRISC devs CCed our conversation to him, but I didn't 
get any reply yet.
So, firstly: if anyone have any contacts with him (except email, of 
course) and could "ping" him, that a poor russian student want to work 
with him, I would be very thankful. :)
Secondly: if Rich won't get in contact, would anyone be interested to 
adopt me and become my mentor instead of Rich?


So here's a little about my background:
* Studying at Far East Federal University (Russia, Vladivostok, UTC 
+10).
* My main interests in CS is HW-SW interaction (and so OSes and system
programming) and software architecture engineering.
* My evaluation work is autonomous surface vehicle project (it's
software part in particular).
At the moment I'm working on different math stuff and playing with RPi
and ROS. Also have very rough Arduino-based prototype of inertial
navigation system.
* Have smth like ~5 years of Linux-user expirience. Can build kernel,
write makefiles and CMakeLists. Know how to use VCS (git, mostly). Have 
a set of
books and stupid university tasks behind my back.
* As far, as I understand, I'll deal with lots of C code and,
probably, ASM code. Well, C is OK. Had tiny ASM practice, but I
understands concepts pretty well, I think.

I might have a *little* lack of *practical* expirience, but
I'm sure I can work it out in no time.


I read through the porting-to-new-arch docs on musl wiki 
(http://wiki.musl-libc.org/wiki/Porting) and looked through musl 
sources.
(offtopic: omg, musl-devs are the best, not all project I've seen so 
far have such simple and easy get-into-problem guides)

As I read Tanenbaum's "Computer Architecture" carefully, I think I 
fully understand this porting guide and so my further steps and my 
proposal would be based on it.
Not to mention, I found musl project most mature among other GSoC 
projects I'm interested and feel more and more thrilled about working 
on it. :)

For now I'm a little bit worried about signals and pthreads, as it is 
most complex part (I think) and I don't *fully* grok *internal* 
mechanisms of synchronization *yet*.
Any advices and any help in this area would be greatly appreciated.


Sorry for huge mail.

Best regards
Roman Titov