GSoC'09: ATA over Ethernet

[Per Hermansson <hermansson.per%bredband.net@localhost>]

Hi

My name is Per Hermansson and I'm a student from the Royal institute of 
technology in Sweden. I'm interested in the ATA over Ethernet project 
idea. Learning to write an initiator for NetBSD seems like a challenging 
task and a good introduction to open source programming (though I'm not 
sure if I'm experienced enough). I have some initial questions about the 
idea that I hope someone here can answer:

As I understand writing the initiator involves both writing a kernel 
driver and a client program for communication (for discovering and 
establishment) is this correct?

The kernel driver will be written in C but what about the client program?

I consider myself to be experienced in both C and C++ but first time 
kernel development seems like a large step to make. Do you recommend any 
literature or any other help that might reduce the gap?

Which of the existing network device drivers would you recommend for 
inspiration when I estimate the difficulty. For example a AoE driver 
would do some similar work compared to the tap driver.

/Per