A while ago I have volunteered as a mentor of the OPW program.

The internship of my mentee, Asal Mirzaeva (Asalle ) has started a few days ago, and so has my mentorship. (Although we have already test-driven the mentor-mentee cooperation during Asalle’s qualification task.)

Her job is:

• to replace manually written byteswapping code in the X-Server with code that is generated from the XCB protocol definitions,
• and to add proper checks to the incoming protocol data, to fix some security problems.

Asalle is currently setting up the build and debug environment for building and debugging the X-Server. (Debugging the X-Server is quite tricky as you can imagine.)

Asalle is very talented and she already has a good understanding of how the protocol handling and byteswapping works in the X-Server, after reading the relevant source code.