Google Summer of Code for BeagleBoard

Here's some good news - BeagleBoard.org has been accepted for the Google Summer of Code programme. At the request of the administrator Jason Kridner i've also signed up as a possible mentor.

There is a gsoc group, a page of project ideas, and there's also there's the list of existing project ideas.

I'm not really sure which projects I would like to mentor given the opportunity, but there are a few that piqued my interest:

• Minix 3 Support - although TBH I've looked at the latest incarnation of the Minix 3 source, and it is very heavily tilted at x86 processors and not arranged in any particularly extensible way. It is also a far cry of untidiness compared to the Minix 3 of Andy Tannenbaum's book. Support for RTEMS (and embeded realtime os) could also be interesting although I don't know much about it.
  
• JTAG Debugger. Unfortunately I myself don't know much about it so probably not for me to mentor - but it would be nice to have a free software hardware debugger.
  
• Improved bootloader support, which mainly falls down to implementing a USB stack for a bootloader so USB ethernet and USB mass storage become available devices. There are currently no free and re-usable USB stacks outside of the main free operating systems so this could be useful for other reasons, including selfish ones.
  
• Any of the many DSP acceleration or NEON acceleration projects. e.g. OpenVG on DSP and/or NEON would probably be a good sized project with utility. Both `heterogeneous computing' and SIMD processors are going to play a big role in computing for the foreseeable future.
  

But there's a ton of other interesting projects in there.