AB Meeting/December 2013 Minutes

Attendees

• Lars Kurth (Citrix, chair)
• Todd Benzies (Linux Foundation)
• Guido Trotter (Google, voting)
• Ian Pratt (Bromium, voting)
• Mark Hinkle (Citrix, voting)
• James Bulpin (Citrix)
• Michelle P Dominijanni (Verizon / Terremark, voting – confirmed with Kevin Clarke before meeting)
• Konrad R Wilk (Oracle, voting)
• Daniel Kiper (Oracle)
• Matt Wilson (Amazon Web Services, voting)
• Richard Phelan (ARM, voting)
• Susi Li (Intel, voting)
• Sherry Hurwitz (AMD, voting)

9 organizations with voting representatives : we had a quorum

Referred to documents

[1] Xen Project Draft Community Plan for 2014 (attached File:Xen Project Draft Community Plan for 2014.pdf)

[2] Xen project Budget v3 (attached File:Xen Project Provisional Budget for 2014 v3.pdf) – this is the same document as version 2, with some additions: I added a column with approval status as per today’s meeting

[3] Xen Project PR Proposal 9.30.13 (attached File:Xen Project PR Proposal 9.30.13.pdf, as Richard had not seen it)

Actions (off-line)

No open actions from previous meeting. For completeness sake:

 Action Lars: Prepare budget proposal and concrete project objectives ✓

 Action All: Confirm whether you can make the budget meeting ✓

 Action Lars: get exact figures for Budget ✓ including some follow-up actions from today

 Action Lars: send mail to xen-devel on 2014 developer events ✓ it seems as if Israel may not be ideal for a Hackathon

Agenda

• Xen Project Community Plan 2014 (see [1])
• Vote whether there should be a Press Release for the Xen 4.4 release in Jan/Feb
• Xen Project Budget 2014 (see [2] and [3])

Note: we managed to get through part of the budget only

Not covered …

• Other Updates
  • Winter Round of Gnome Outreach Program for Women : we had 2 viable applicants. One disqualified due to program rules, the other applicant was accepted for both the Xen Project and the Linux Kernel and chose the latter. This means that the $5,750 + 15% administrative fee have not been spent
  • Verizon / Samsung updates (Linux Foundation) – this was covered by Lars
  • Mirage OS Press release report – report was sent off-line

Summary

• Xen Project Community Plan 2014  : approved
• Vote whether there should be a Press Release for the Xen 4.4 release in Jan/Feb : approved
• Xen Project Budget 2014 : approved with the exception of budget related to the Test Infrastructure (we did not get to this point)
  • This includes the AR/PR proposal

Xen Project Draft Community Plan for 2014

Lars presented [1] – some detailed questions to individual slides below.

Vote|Motion:  to approve the plan, which was carried unanimously

Slide 4: FY14 Goal, Strategy & Initiatives

Daniel Kiper (Oracle) asked whether we should not focus on increasing the number of patches submitted rather than focussing on growth of the developer community

Lars:

• some more detail on this is covered in slide 9
• With the growth of the developer community - for example Verizon and other new entrants to the community starting to submit patches - I expect that our capacity to review patches will increase in time (which is a potential bottleneck).
• Due to the meritocratic model in the Xen Project, where maintainers and committers have to demonstrate technical knowledge and ongoing contributions to the project, I expect that our capability to accept more patches in a given year will lag somewhat compared to growth of developers contributing
• The shortening of release cycles in the Xen Project has led to more elapsed time where the codebase is locked compared to the past (e.g. in 2013 we had two periods of code freeze)
• The 2013 data (compared to 2014) does not yet cover all of 2013 – I believe that we will see a slight growth in 2013 overall compared to 2012

Slide 7: Expand Direct Involvement of User Community

Susi Li (Intel) : raised the question on whether it would not make more sense to focus on Xen consuming communities (market segments) such as OpenStack, rather than direct consumers of Xen.

Lars: actually this is what I meant. In other words, increasing Xen adoption for example in OpenStack, is exactly an example of the type of market segment we need to identify. Of course, different vendors on the AB may have different priorities. I will be looking for input from the AR/PR working group and the Advisory Board to define 2 focus areas in early 2014.

Sherry Hurwitz (AMD): raised the point that most of our teams are focussed on Hypervisor Development. It is not always clear what needs to be done in the Hypervisor to support market segments further up the stack. Maybe we need to look at this as a project/initiative.

Lars: that is clearly an approach we can take. Again, first we need to identify important focus areas, and then find a way to support these.

Slide 9: Grow Developer Community by 10%

Richard Phelan (ARM) asked whether we had a University outreach program.

Lars:

• Currently the answer is no : we do have a number of Universities (Cambridge UK, US East Coast, Korea, Hong Kong, …) who teach and do active research around Xen
• Typically most researchers are snapped up quite quickly within the eco-system when they go to market
• Also, about 1/3 of Google Summer of Code (and similar programs) have remained in the Xen Ecosystem and were employed by vendors in the eco-system when they became available. Examples: Daniel Kiper, Wei Lui, Andres Lagar-Cavilla
• And we have granted travel stipends at summits to researchers in 2013

Press Release for the Xen 4.4

Vote|Motion:  to approve a press release for Xen 4.4 has been approved unanimously

Xen Project Budget 2014

Lars presented [2] – also see [3] for more information on the AR/PR proposal – subsections covered areas with discussion (where it took place)

Vote|Motion:  approved portions of the budget unanimously as below

Operational	6,900.00	2%	Approved in December Advisory Board meeting
AR/PR	115,000.00	28%	Approved in December Advisory Board meeting
Supporting the Developer Community	70,725.00	17%	Approved in December Advisory Board meeting
General Marketing	21,850.00	5%	Approved in December Advisory Board meeting	Mark Hinkle requested to add some budget for ongoing website development. To be discussed at the next AB meeting.
Test Framework	190,612.50	47%	To be discussed at the next AB meeting, as we did not have time and there are also a number of practical issues that need to be resolved.

AR/PR

• Todd Benzies (Linux Foundation) clarified that proposals are charged to projects annually or twice a year (Lars updated spreadsheet)
• Sherry Hurwitz (AMD) asked whether we are paying for an ongoing service – this was confirmed by Todd and Mark
• Sherry Hurwitz (AMD) asked further how we would hold the Linux Foundation accountable in terms of Quality of Service. Todd pointed out that services are listed in [3] and that there would be a standard PR services contract between the Linux Foundation and the project

 Action Lars: Re-send [3] ✓

 Action Lars: Ask for PR services contract and share with AB

• Richard Phelan (ARM) ask how much AB involvement would be required.
• Lars: I would expect this pretty much to run along the lines of how we handled things in the past
  • AB would approve press releases is we have in 2013: a) no/go decision for a topic by mail
  • AR/PR contact would also work closely with Lars and the AR/PR working group in developing the story. Key decisions would be sent for review and those AB members who care, can influence, raise objections, etc.
  • Reports would be sent as for the December press release

General Marketing

• Mark Hinkle (Citrix) asked to add an item for website development to be included in the next version of the budget. Mark stated that he will ask for budget within Citrix too, but it would be good if we could get some backup approved in case he doesn’t get it.

 Action Lars: Ask for input from Russell and update budget spreadsheet [2] for January meeting