GSoC 2023 topics

Cockpit is a free and open-source front-end tool that provides administrative access to Linux systems.

Here are some ideas for the GSoC program in 2023.

VBox support in cockpit Virtual Machines plugin

“Cockpit Machines,” is a plugin which interacts with libvirtd and lets users create and manage Virtual Machines. It currently only supports QEMU/KVM hypervisor driver. Libvirt itself has support for other hypervisor drivers, including VirtualBox.

This project is about extending cockpit-machines codebase to include support for VirtualBox driver.

Read more to get some idea of the tasks for this project:

Eliminate hard-coded APIs and parameterize the hypervisor selection while keeping hardcoded Dbus paths, virsh connections APIs etc separately

[kkoukiou@sequioa cockpit-machines]$ git grep -e '/org/libvirt/QEMU' -e 'qemu:///' | wc -l
79

Use Patternfly to introduce in the UI a driver selection component and let the user switch between hypervisors
Identify which APIs are supported by libvirt for each hypervisor and hide the unsupported operations from the UI

It's desired approach to start conservatively by introducing a minimal set of features for the new driver and incrementally enable features while extending the test suite.

Technologies used: Javascript, React, python Knowledge of virtualization technologies is a plus

Related discussion: https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/issues/11711

Disk usage analyzer new plugin

We want to provide users with an easy way to review the use of their server's storage space. This new plugin should be able to:

Scan a folder, including all subfolders
Show percentage based disk usage similarly to Gnome's disk usage analyzer
Delete a file or folder for the purpose of cleaning up space
Once this plugin identifies that a storage is full it should send a notification to the Cockpit's main navigation panel which will warn users about low disk space, when they use Cockpit but not the specific page

Technologies used: Javascript, React, python

Related discussion: https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/issues/14083, https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/issues/8787