GSoC Student Introduction

Hello,

My name is Kayla (Kat) Powell. I am one of the GSoC Students selected for
this summer and wanted to introduce myself and my project.

I am going into my senior year at San Francisco State University studying
computer science (big surprise!). Some of my hobbies include drawing,
music, and video games. But, in particular, I have a passion for operating
systems that started back in my freshman year when I ditched Windows for a
weekend-long Gentoo Linux install---an experience that sparked my interest
in system internals and OS hacking. Since then, I’ve developed a true
appreciation for not only the simplicity and engineering of UNIX systems,
but also its collaborative nature that offers a rich fountain of growth and
knowledge, uniting people from all walks of life.

This interest led me to FreeBSD. It is at the heart of BSD UNIX and has a
great permissive license. Its many use cases with an approachable
contributor base has intertwined it into my life in many ways, such as my
NAS, website backend, and learning source. If you were at the recent
FreeBSD summit in November, you probably saw my boyfriend and me sitting in
the back absorbing all the amazing information. Now, in this whirlwind of
events, I have been gratefully accepted as a GSoC Student under imp@, where
I’ve taken several of his “crazy” ideas and tied them into one project:
ACPI Initialization in Loader with Lua Bindings.

Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is Intel’s power
management specification. It revolutionized power management by bringing it
into the operating system, rather than the BIOS. As it stands right now, it
is in the FreeBSD kernel, which is great, and most of it can stay there.
But, we specifically need to bring ACPI’s initialization routines into the
loader, so we can (1) relieve the bootloader of having to guess ACPI
information and (2) integrate it into the Lua interpreter. The outcome of
this project will be the enumeration of the ACPI namespace into Lua
bindings so we can ultimately script ACPI. The goal is to not only address
the former inefficiencies, but to provide easier power management to all
FreeBSD users, whether it be for embedded systems, servers, or desktop
users.

I am really excited to contribute to this project with imp@. I have high
respect for him (and for the FreeBSD space in general), and I am extremely
grateful to be here. If anyone has any knowledge/input on my project space,
please don’t hesitate to reach out. I look forward to meeting everyone!

Kind regards,
Kat Powell
Linkedin <https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpowkitty> | Github
<https://www.github.com/kpowkitty>