Archived/Xen Development Projects

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Revision as of 23:27, 7 August 2012 by Dariof (talk | contribs) (Added a project about SEDF multiprocessor support)


Icon todo.png Needs Refactor

This should be moved to the relevant's a project overview page (or at least be accessible from it). This is basically our "Get Involved" page


Xen Development Projects

This page lists various Xen related development projects that can be picked up by anyone! If you're interesting in hacking Xen this is the place to start! Ready for the challenge?

To work on a project:

  • Find a project that looks interesting.
  • Send an email to xen-devel mailinglist and let us know you started working on a specific project.
  • Post your ideas, questions, RFCs to xen-devel sooner than later so you can get comments and feedback.
  • Send patches to xen-devel early for review so you can get feedback and be sure you're going into correct direction.
  • Your work should be based on xen-unstable development tree, if it's Xen and/or tools related. After your patch has been merged to xen-unstable it can be backported to stable branches (Xen 4.0, Xen 3.4, etc).
  • Your kernel related patches should be based on either upstream kernel.org git tree (latest version), or xen/stable-2.6.32.x tree, depending if it's upstream or xen dom0 related work.

xen-devel mailinglist subscription and archives: http://lists.xensource.com/mailman/listinfo/xen-devel

Before to submit patches, please look at Submitting Xen Patches wiki page.


List of projects

If you have new ideas, suggestions or development plans let us know and we'll update this list!

Domain support

Upstreaming Xen PVSCSI drivers to mainline Linux kernel

Date of insert: 01/08/2012; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: Unknown
Technical contact: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@
IRC channel for project: #xen-devel
Difficulty: Unknown
Skills Needed: Unknown
Description: PVSCSI drivers needs to be upstreamed yet. Necessary operations may include:
Outcomes: Not specified, project outcomes


Upstreaming Xen PVUSB drivers to mainline Linux kernel

Date of insert: 01/08/2012; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: Unknown
Technical contact: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@
IRC channel for project: #xen-devel
Difficulty: Unknown
Skills Needed: Unknown
Description: PVUSB drivers needs to be upstreamed yet. Necessary operations may include:
Outcomes: Not specified, project outcomes


Blkback improvements

Date of insert: 02/08/2012; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: Unknown
Technical contact: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@
IRC channel for project: #xen-devel
Difficulty: Unknown
Skills Needed: Unknown
Description: Blkback requires a number of improvements, some of them being:
  • Multiple disks in a guest cause contention in the global pool of pages.
  • There is only one ring page and with SSDs nowadays we should make this larger, implementing some multi-page support.
  • With multi-page it becomes apparent that the segment size ends up wasting a bit of space on the ring. BSD folks fixed that by negotiating a new parameter to utilize the full size of the ring.
  • Add DIF/DIX support [1]
  • Further perf evaluation needs to be done to see how it behaves under high load.
Outcomes: Not specified, project outcomes


Netback overhaul

Date of insert: 02/08/2012; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: Unknown
Technical contact: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@
IRC channel for project: #xen-devel
Difficulty: Unknown
Skills Needed: Unknown
Description: Wei Liu posted RFC patches that make the driver be multi-page, multi-event channel and with a page-pool. However not all the issues have been addressed yet, meaning that the patches need to be finished and cleaned up yet. Additively, a zero-copy implementation can be considered. Patch serie and discussions:
Outcomes: Not specified, project outcomes


PAT writecombine fixup

Date of insert: 02/08/2012; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: Unknown
Technical contact: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@
IRC channel for project: #xen-devel
Difficulty: Unknown
Skills Needed: Unknown
Description: The writecombine feature (especially for graphic adapters) is turned off due to stability reasons. More specifically, the code involved in page transition from WC to WB gets confused about the PSE bit state in the page, resulting in a set of repeated warnings.

For more informations please check:

Outcomes: Not specified, project outcomes


ACPI S3-state investigation and fixup

Date of insert: 02/08/2012; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: Unknown
Technical contact: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@
IRC channel for project: #xen-devel
Difficulty: Unknown
Skills Needed: Unknown
Description: During Linux-3.3 release the the S3-state was supposed to work including these patches: But now it is not working anymore. Scope of the project is understanding the reasons for the issues and fix them.
Outcomes: Not specified, project outcomes


PUD L3 - big memory - fixup

Date of insert: 02/08/2012; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: Unknown
Technical contact: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@
IRC channel for project: #xen-devel
Difficulty: Unknown
Skills Needed: Unknown
Description: Right now guests don't boot with a huge amount of requested kernel memory (tries report failing with certainly 384GB). Scope of the project is understanding the reasons and fix them. This likely involves digging into the toolstack too.
Outcomes: Not specified, project outcomes


Parallel xenwatch

Date of insert: 01/08/2012; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: Unknown
Technical contact: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@
IRC channel for project: #xen-devel
Difficulty: Unknown
Skills Needed: Unknown
Description: Xenwatch is locked with a coarse lock. For a huge number of guests this represents a scalability issue. The need is to rewrite the xenwatch locking in order to support full scalability.
Outcomes: Not specified, project outcomes

Hypervisor

Microcode uploader implementation

Date of insert: 02/08/2012; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: Unknown
Technical contact: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@
IRC channel for project: #xen-devel
Difficulty: Unknown
Skills Needed: Unknown
Description: Intel is working on early implementation where the microcode blob would be appended to the initrd image. The kernel would scan for the appropiate magic constant and load the microcode very early. The Xen hypervisor can do this similary.
Outcomes: Not specified, project outcomes


SEDF Multiprocessor Support

Date of insert: 08/08/2012; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: Unknown
Technical contact: Dario Faggioli <dario.faggioli@citrix.com>
Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@
IRC channel for project: #xen-devel
Difficulty: Unknown
Skills Needed: Unknown
Description: The SEDF scheduler, within Xen, does not properly handle SMP systems, unless specific vcpu pinning is specified by the user. That is a big limitation of the current implementation, especially since EDF (the algorithm the scheduler uses) could be easily extended to work in that situations. The first thing to do would be turn from using one SEDF runqueue per processor one runqueue per "cluster of processors" (like for instance using one runqueue per-L3, as scredit2 is doing). That would already increase the effectiveness of the scheduler on current hardware a lot. After that, a mechanism for balancing and migrating vcpus among different runqueues can be designed and implemented.
Outcomes: Not specified, project outcomes

Performance

Performance tools overhaul

Date of insert: 02/08/2012; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: Unknown
Technical contact: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@
IRC channel for project: #xen-devel
Difficulty: Unknown
Skills Needed: Unknown
Description: Generally, works on the performance tool themselves should be listes separately to the Xen_Profiling:_oprofile_and_perf wiki page.
Outcomes: Not specified, project outcomes

Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) and XAPI projects

There are separate wiki pages about XCP and XAPI related projects. Make sure you check these out aswell!


Quick links to changelogs of the various Xen related repositories/trees

Please see XenRepositories wiki page!