Google Summer of Code 2017 Mentor Summit
I attended the GSoC 2017 Mentor Summit - Photo! It was an enjoyable event, and a good learning experience.
The Google Summer of Code 2017 Mentor Summit ran from Oct 13th to the 15th, at Google’s Sunnyvale campus. It was held as an "Unconference", so most of the sessions were pretty ad-hoc.
On Saturday morning I ran into a couple of ex-colleagues, attending the summit on behalf of the Performance Co-Pilot project. We took the opportunity to start the conference with a monitoring BoF, which focussed on some of the current upstream PCP challenges, such as bulk archive analysis and caching (with Redis). We had a quick look at the PCP cifs.ko monitoring agent, where I raised concerns about it only supporting the SMB1 /proc/fs/cifs/Stats format. My preference would be to in future move the cifs.ko stats into per-metric files nested under per-mount/session sysfs directories, to make the stats easier to parse programatically.
I attended quite a few other interesting talks, covering Computer Vision/AI, Linux/ChromeOS (Grant Grundler), Crypto Currencies, and fuzzing. The libfuzzy talk, held by Kostya Serebryany, was probably the most relevant to Samba. Kostya walked through the list of FOSS projects which are automatically tested as part of Google’s oss-fuzz program, and described the breakdown of bugs discovered (hundreds of potential security vulnerabilities). Most of the material can be found at https://testing.googleblog.com/2017/05/oss-fuzz-five-months-later-and.html . As a GSoC participant, Samba is in a position to receive GCE backed automated fuzz testing. It should just be a matter of ensuring that Samba can be built with LLVM/Clang, identifying target APIs, and submitting a request via https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz#accepting-new-projects .
I gave a quick presentation on rapid testing of cifs.ko against Samba from source (similar to https://youtu.be/XTEGe0lG3yc). Not many attendees, but still got some good questions at the end.
In the hallway track, I spoke with Ton Roosendaal about a few issues that he’d been seeing regarding macOS SMB clients against Samba. A few questions came in about cross-share server-side copy, which I was gladly able to answer. On Sunday, we had a get together for Software Freedom Conservency member projects. After introductions, we discussed upcoming events, and fund raising challenges; the SFC are ramping up for an end of year fund raising drive.
[I would like to thank Google for paying for my travel to the event.]
Cheers, David Disseldorp