Ideas

This is a place for Gentoo developers to share information about their efforts to improve Gentoo among themselves and with others. This also includes ideas that they are unable to pursue in a reasonable period of time that would be best taken by someone else. Our hope is that this will foster greater collaboration and increase innovation in Gentoo.

Please keep these lists alphabetized. When you add an item, please include a description of what this is, a statement of how this benefits Gentoo and who is working on it. Feel free to list your name in things that need developers if you are interested, but are unable to work on this without collaborators.

= Under Development =

LLVM/Clang System Compiler Support
LLVM/Clang is a new compiler that was written in C++ with a strong emphasis on code correctness and extensibility. Its static analyzer is excellent at detecting incorrect code and this enables us to improve the quality of Gentoo as a whole.

Supporting LLVM/Clang as a System Compiler in Gentoo requires fixing all packages in @system that fail to build with it. It also requires that bootloaders and kernel sources are available that can be built with it. Once these hurdles are resolved, it will be possible to provide a switch so that users can select it as the system compiler in place of GCC.

ryao is working on this. It is bug #408963.

ZFSOnLinux Support
ZFS is a filesystem originally designed by Sun Microsystems that focuses on data integrity, performance and scalability. It includes RAID capabilities, logical volume management, data compression and all of the other capabilities one would expect from a filesystem. Notable features include its Copy-On-Write design which enables it to withstand system failures without a journal and its implementation of the Adaptive Replacement Cache algorithm, which provides excellent read performance on non-sequential workloads.

ZFS support in Gentoo will improve system reliability. Power outages will no longer require a fsck, backups will be easier to do via the transmission of snapshots and accidental damage to the filesystem can be reversed through snapshots. An additional benefit will be greater performance and scalability. People will be able to use system memory and SSDs in place of expensive RAID hardware and obtain greater levels of performance in both random IO and sequential performance.

ryao is working on this.

= Needs Developer =

Gentoo Minix port
Minix is a BSD-style operating system by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. It uses a microkernel architecture and it is designed with a strong emphasis on reliability. It is designed to be able to recover from hardware faults and it is also quite small.

Porting Gentoo to Minix will enable us to provide an operating system with the ability to recover from hardware faults. It could also serve as a research environment for future projects.