BOINC software development

BOINC is free software, distributed under the ​Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The University of California holds the copyright on all BOINC source code. By submitting contributions to the BOINC code, you irrevocably assign all right, title, and interest, including copyright and all copyright rights, in such contributions to The Regents of the University of California, who may then use the code for any purpose that it desires.

Get and build BOINC software

• Get source code?
• Software prerequisites
• Building on Unix
  • Installing python-mysqldb
• Building applications
• Building the client
• applications on Mac OS X
• Linux VMs for use with BOINC

BOINC development

• Personnel and contributors
• Development process
• Development projects
• boinc_dev, an email list for BOINC developers
• Coding style
• Using SVN
• Debugging the client on Windows

Writing add-on software

BOINC's architecture is 'open'; documented interfaces making it possible to develop various types of applications and web sites that interact with BOINC components. Examples include:

• Client GUIs: Applications that control a local or remote core client.
• Credit statistics web sites: Web sites showing credit information (project totals, user/team/country leaderboards) based on daily XML feeds of statistics data from BOINC projects. The XML format is documented here.
• Account managers: Web sites that let BOINC users create and manage accounts on multiple projects.
• Aggregate credit statistics
• Server status web sites?: Web sites showing the server status of BOINC projects.
• Web RPCs: These interfaces let a program or web site obtain information about users and hosts from projects.
• Server status web RPC?
• Local editing of preferences: This mechanism lets you write programs for local editing of preferences.

Check the index of add-on software before writing anything (it may already exist). The index has instructions for submitting new add-ons.

Simulation

• Client simulator
• Web interface to client simulator

Implementation notes

Client

• File structure
• FSM structure
• Data structures?
• Main loop logic
• Client scheduling policies
• Host measurements
• Host identification
• Core client/application interaction (basic)?
• Client configuration files?
• Automatic update
• Memory management
• Screensaver logic
• Sandbox implementation
• Client setup logic for Windows
• Windows client setup logic for 6.0

Server programs

• The BOINC database
• Backend state transitions
• The logic of backend programs
• Debugging server components
• Notes on BOINC server security

Protocols

• Protocol overview
• The scheduling server protocol
• Scheduling server timing and retry policies
• Data server protocol
• Persistent file transfers

Miscellaneous

• Cross-project identification?
• Project simulator
• Python framework
• Preferences
• Trickle messages
• How to see what has changed between two versions of an executable
• Spec info for RPMs
• XML formats
• Diagnostics API
• Low latency computing
• Alpha test matrix?

Historical

Design docs for old versions, or for ideas that never happened.

• Version 4 runtime system
• Mac/Intel plan
• Old Mac project plan
• Design of version 5 setup
• Mac Menubar
• Work sequences
• Usability discussion
• Disk management
• Testing framework