[asterisk-dev] GSoC 2010 - Calling for Project Ideas and Mentors

[Jared Smith]

On Tue, 2010-03-02 at 21:18 -0600, Tim Ringenbach wrote:

> Some random ideas:

Some random responses from a non-developer:

> 1. I've heard the complaint that IAX2 suffers on the performance front
> because of it's use of a single port for singling and audio. 

Changing the IAX protocol to use different ports for signaling and audio
would break one of the fundamental advantages of the IAX protocol, in
that it does a much better job of traversing NAT firewalls because of
this design.  I'm not saying the performance can't be improved, I'm just
saying that splitting the media out to a different port probably isn't
the best way.

> 2. Eliminate channel masquerades and come up with some better way to
> handle the need for them. 

There's a new bridging API in Asterisk 1.6.2 and later which already
addresses this concern.  There's still a lot of work to be done to start
moving apps over to the new API, but from what (little) I understand,
the hardest part has already been done.

> 3. Run a tool like helgrind or ThreadSanitizer on asterisk and fix all
> the errors, add unit tests so they don't come back, etc. Some of those
> tools need annotations in the source to flag false positives, so add
> those too.

There are a lot of tools we *could* run against Asterisk... in my own
spare time last last fall I experimented with the clang analyzer
utility.  While it pointed out a fair number of places where we could
improve the code, it also pointed out a lot of false positives, and so
we have to weigh the benefits of taking a developer's time to analyze
each one vs. the other things they could be doing.

Unfortunately, I don't think that a student would be in the best
position to know which of the items are serious concerns and which are
false positives, as it takes a pretty robust understanding of the
Asterisk code.  Maybe there is some low hanging fruit that can be done
by a student over the summer, and he can highlight places that require
more in-depth analysis by an experienced developer?

--
Jared Smith
Digium, Inc.