A few Haiku news sites have gotten together and will be conducting a series of interviews with some of the GSoC applicants (both accepted and not). Here is our interview with JiSheng Zhang who applied to work on improving Haiku's PCI functionality. Unfortunately he was not one of the chosen students. Not because of his lack of ability but there simply wasn't enough space to accomodate all the great developers who applied this year.

1. Tell us a bit about yourself

I am studying CS, focusing on embedded operating systems. My experience of opensource development is related with Haiku, Linux kernel driver and rtems. During the Google Summer of Code 2007, I was lucky to work on porting FreeBSD's firewire stack to Haiku. The project was successfully completed. I'm also one of the HCD 2008 students;) I also submit some linux kernel patches to LKML. As for RTEMS, I have ported linux new firewire stack(a.k.a juju) to rtems in 2007.

2. How did you hear of GSoC?

I knew it on haiku-development maillist

3. What convinced you that Haiku is a project worth working on?

First, Haiku's clean design and implementation attracts me. Second, old hand mentors with lots of development experience and friendly community

4. How'd you first hear about Haiku and do you have any experience with BeOS or Zeta?

My hobby in my spare time is reading the kernel source of OS. I have heard of openbeos before.  One day in 2006 I searched with the key "openbeos" and found Haiku. I have no experience with Beos or zeta

5. What did you apply to work on,  why did that specifically interest you?

PCI improvement.

Some bugs related with pci bus manager have been seen in the last two years such as ticket 2620, 3313. The main reason is the bios of some platform can't handle pci correctly such as irq allocation while haiku depeond on the bios assignment. What's more, the irq assignment between pci devices isn't balanced. For example, we can see the firewire ohci, sata2 ahci, usb_uhci, usb_ehci, display card and the ethernet controller share one irq from the log of ticket 3595. Too many device sharing one irq will do a little harm to performence for all their ISR will carried out to check whether the interrupt is caused by themself. So I want to work on it.

6. If you do not get the chance to work on the project you applied for is there another area that interests you?

fuse BFS support. This project will make it possible to read and write bfs partition under Linux using native utils such as cat\cd\file\ls etc.

7. What influenced your decision to become a programmer? What is/are your language(s) of choice?

Happiness when hacking and coding. C and C++ are the main languages I used

8. Is there anything Haiku (as an organization, website, community, individuals, any facet of Haiku) could have done differently to help you as an applying student? Was anything overly complicated or discouraging?

Hmm, it would be better if there are breif internal introductions of haiku's pci\acpi\PIC subsystem.

9. Do you have any suggestions or constructive criticism for the people involved with Haiku's participation in GSoC?

I have one suggestion for students whose summer will begin from July. Start working on the project as early as possible, because we will have exams or other issues during June. There will be little time in June.

10. Besides Haiku, did you apply to any of the other orgs involved with GSoC? If so which ones?

This year, I applied both Haiku and RTEMS

11. Would you be interested in a possible Haiku Code Drive? (a similar format to GSoC but specific to Haiku and donations are taken to raise money to pay the participants)

I ranked high in both application of Haiku and the one of rtems. Haiku preferred new students. So, at last, I was accepted by RTEMS. If I was not accepted by RTEMS, I will paticipate possible HCD this year.