OPW Poster
The Outreach Program for Women (OPW) internships were inspired in many ways by Google Summer of Code and by how few women applied for it in the past. This was reflective of a generally low number of women participating in the FOSS development. The GNOME Foundation first started the internships program with one round in 2006, and then resumed the effort in 2010 with rounds organized every half a year. In the January-April 2013 round, many other FOSS organizations joined the program.
The application deadline for interns is November 11, 2013. For a list of projects for interns and more information on how to apply, check our Xen Project OPW portal.
Round 6 of OPW
In round 6 of the Program, we had two interns that worked on Xen Components in the Linux kernel:
- Elena Ufimtseva worked on virtual NUMA for the Xen Project. Elena will be presenting at Xen Project Developer Summit next week. Why not come and see her talk?
- Lisa Nguyen worked on Xen block drivers in the linux kernel’ Lisa presenter her work at LinuxCon NA 2013. Check out her slides!
We asked both Elena and Lisa to talk a bit about their work and experiences, in their own words.
Elena Ufimtseva:
The OPW Linux Kernel internship and my work on Xen Project vNUMA is one of the more inspirational events of my life. I had a chance to meet and work with great people from the open source community and dive into technical details of OS and Xen architectures. My mentors were very supportive and provided excellent guidance throughout my internship.
I am happy to work on system software engineering and I will continue to do so and learn. I also hope I can help to other women to start developing for Linux OS and Xen.
I worked on the Xen block drivers with Konrad. I had to grok the Linux block layer and use the SCSI debug module for I/O testing. The goal of my project was to extend the Xen frontend and backend drivers by implementing DIF/DIX, a protocol to add extra checksum information. Currently, I am still working on this project with Konrad on my spare time, aiming to submit RFC patches to the xen-devel mailing list.
To be exact, the Xen Project wiki described my project well. This project allowed me to transition from a Xen user to a Xen developer, so my knowledge of Xen grew tremendously. Not to mention I had to use a different set of commands (moving from xe to xl/xm).
It looks as if Elena and Lisa learned a lot and also had fun doing the internship. We are looking forward to welcoming more Women into the Xen community for Round 7 of OPW, and hopefully many more in future.