CentOS and GSoC 2015 — suddenly come seven on 7

The CentOS Project is now the proud mentoring organization for seven students to work on projects this summer under the Google Summer of Code (GSoC.)

Below is a quick snapshot of the projects and the communication channels for keeping track or participating in the activities the students will generate around themselves as the get to work. For the most part, these projects are focused on technologies around the latest Linux from the project, CentOS Linux 7.

To keep overall track of what is going on across all the students' projects, watch the CentOS planet blog aggregator, planet.centos.org; students individual blogs are found at the CentOS 7 blog seven.centos.org.

• A single installer ISO for a functional Xen4 stack on CentOS 6 will deliver a consumeable ISO that does not need CentOS to be preinstalled on the machine. The original idea was developed to a proposal by the student Gautam Malu, who is mentored by George Dunlap. Discussions will happen on the centos-devel@centos.org and the centos-virt@centos.org mailing lists.
• Cloud in a box aims to provide a preconfigured, assumption driven, easily installed single node cloud controller for development and Proof of Concept testing. The original idea was developed to a proposal by the student Asad Hussein, who is mentored by Rich Bowen. Discussions will happen on the centos-devel@centos.org mailing list.
• Develop a kpatch delivery mechanism is focused on making it possible for users to easily consume live patching in the Linux Kernel. The original idea was developed to a proposal by the student Louis Taylor, who is mentored by Corey Henderson. Discussions will happen on the centos-devel@centos.org mailing list.
• Implement and create new documentation toolchain (1, 2) is an ambitious endeavor split across two students to implement and partially create a toolchain that lowers the barriers to contributing.The original idea was developed to proposals by the students are Kunal Jain and Lei Yang, who are mentored by Karsten Wade. Discussions will happen on the centos-docs@centos.org and centos-devel@centos.org mailing list.
• Lightweight cloud instance contextualization tool is around developing a lightweight, zero dependancy cloud instance contextualisation tool. The original idea was developed to a proposal by the student Tamer Tas, who is mentored by Haikel Guemar. Discussions will happen on the centos-devel@centos.org mailing list.
• RootFS build factory for CentOS will deliver a set of scripts and tools needed to unpack stock CentOS Linux Arm 32bit images and rebuild / rebundle them based on the target machine the image needs to be dropped into. The original idea was developed to a proposal by the student Mandar Joshi, who is mentored by Ian McLeod. Discussions will happen on the centos-devel@centos.org mailing list.

Getting this all together has been fun -- working with the students- and mentors-to-be, organizing processes, all the way back to the idea generation and prep phases, all a whirlwind of activity. I've done GSoC as a mentor and administrator since 2006 (second year of GSoC) and other summer coding efforts, and it's hard not to have things be a bit chaotic with so many moving parts. I'm really looking forward to the benefits newer organizations get from having to prepare and work with students throughout the effort.