Fast-user-switching and NetworkManager

Posted on August 15, 2010

Google Summer of Code (GSoC), 2010
NetworkManager: Fast-user-switching support and related goodness
Dan Williams, mentor

Each summer, Google sponsors a number of students to work on free/open source projects. Any student in the world has the opportunity to submit project proposals, and around 1000 are selected and paired with “mentors”, experienced free/open source software developers who advise the students as they complete their proposed projects.

Here is the abstract from my project proposal:

There are a number of problems with how user-specific network connection settings are handled by NetworkManager. For example, the current approach does not work with fast-user-switching, and it’s difficult for applications modify user-specific network settings data without being responsible for all of the settings data. This project will address these problems.

Much of my work was focused on planning the major architecture changes this effort required. My work here represents a contribution to the 0.9 release of NetworkManager.

Code sample [tar.bz2], a collection of patchsets representing the code contributions I made during this project. This tarball was submitted as the “code sample” required by Google at project completion.
Presentation [ogv], a presentation I gave on GSoC and my project for the Union College 2010 Summer Research seminar series. This talk was primarily intended to describe the GSoC program to other students.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.