Xen Document Days/TODO

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Requested Documentation

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Big work items

• Distros and Users: we need to provide better information on Xen users and distros
  • Category:Host_Install and Category:Guest_Install are a good start
  • What is missing are links that show how to create distro bugs for specific distros, etc.
  • Other documentation which points users to specific distros. Maybe we should have a page per distro that contains Xen with relevant information int it?
• Feature status docs for end-users showing which features are expected to work in 4.0 and, possibly 4.1.2. Most people don't know if Feature X is even supposed to work on the Xen build their distro uses. And almost everything is broken somewhere! This is tricky since 4.0 (debian) still has rough edges like immediate panic when doing mem-set on a HV domU by mistake
  • Lars.kurth One way to approach handle this is to go through release notes and old blog posts and collate a table.
• An XCP Overview (similar to Xen Overview)
• A Xen Security Guide: The different options in Xen for Security, trade-offs, how to set them up, how to test Xen for security and how to optimize for different scenarios
  • Lars.kurth 09:48, 27 March 2012 (UTC): Category:Security contains some security related docs
  • Lars.kurth 11:01, 4 April 2012 (UTC): It would be good if we could document a) XSM, b) Introspection API, c) Xen and SELinux in Dom0, d) Memory Access API (introduced in 4.1)
• User Docs that where migrating content would make sense and update such as (we can attach PDF's to the wiki now for starters, or we can use a conversion tool
  • http://bits.xensource.com/Xen/docs/user.pdf

In progress:

• An Overview over Xen for people who do not yet use Xen, to help them make a decision on whether Xen is for them (aka "Why Xen" and "Which Xen") (be sure to mention "fastest" ;)
  • Lars.kurth 09:48, 27 March 2012 (UTC): am working on this and am almost ready to publish on the wiki

Done recently:

• A Xen Overview which explains the top level architectural features and options, trade-offs and links to examples tutorials that show how you set these up
  • Lars.kurth 09:48, 27 March 2012 (UTC): Category:Overview is a starting point, but this is patchy right now
  • Lars.kurth 22:35, 19 April 2012 (UTC): We have Paravirtualization (PV) & PV on HVM. I also have some bits and pieces that I have written for the new website, which could be moved to the wiki.
  • Lars.kurth 22:35, 19 April 2012 (UTC): Getting Started and Xen Overview v2
• A Xen Tuning Guide: different options in Xen impacting performance, how to set them up, how to tune
  • Lars.kurth 09:48, 27 March 2012 (UTC): Category:Performance contains some performance related docs
• Distros

Categories

• Review the Debian and Openstack categories and add documentation that exists in other places.
• Installation Guides
  • ijc: How to install on various distros. Tag with Category:Host Install and Category:Guest_Install. We seem to only have one or two of these but I thought we had more. Perhaps need to link to external sites (e.g. distro wikis/docs)
  • Lars.kurth 09:52, 27 March 2012 (UTC): moved a few from Category:RefToExternalArticle to Guest Install. May be worth looking at http://grantmcwilliams.com/tech/virtualization/xen-howtos and http://grantmcwilliams.com/tech/virtualization/xcp-howtos
• Ijc 06:14, 28 April 2012 (UTC): Category:Host Configuration has some TBDs in it and needs more pages adding.
• Ijc 06:47, 28 April 2012 (UTC): Host OS Install Considerations as a place to describe consdierations which are useful before installing the domain 0 OS.

Admin docs

• Setting boot order for domUs (PV and HVM)
• Chaining pypxeboot and pygrub
  • ijc: pypxeboot == tools/misc/xenpvnetboot?
  • Lars.kurth 10:35, 27 March 2012 (UTC): I found http://sourceforge.net/projects/pypxeboot/ - I don't actually know how added this request. Is pypxeboot popular at all?

[[User:Fheigl|Fheigl] I added that. It is somewhat common, OVM 2 and OVM 3 rely on it for PXE installs. I'm not sure if xenpvnetboot is the same, or works. The use case is "you want to use the same installation server for Xen VMs and phys. servers. You want to be able to reinstall them based on PXE reply. There is documentation for pypxeboot, but there is no (afaik) documentation for how pygrub is used as a fallback loader. We wasted many days just to get some hack that can't even load a newer kernel. Which sucks, in the end you spend more time/money making PV PXE boot work than you save by using virtualized servers.

• xenpm usage recommendations
• setting up vnc mime magic for xen in firefox (oracle has srpms for a vnc client plugin)
• vcpu pinning
• using xm trigger to poweroff or firing off NMIs
• Expand Host Configuration/Networking docs to cover non-bridge network configurations supported by xend (e.g. routed, nat'd). Possibly split into a page per config.

Developer Docs

Docs for distro packagers

• List i.e. stuff what to test after packaging. This would avoid the current state of affairs where most distros are infact broken w/re to Xen. See Distros

Docs that need attention or are missing

• Make XAPI docs (built from source) available on xen.org
• PVOPS portal on xen.org - Konrad volunteered
• some more xenstore docs (i.e. recent python bindings that were sent to the -users list
• Using libxenstat python bindings (imo they're broken)
• More PV protocol docs (see recent patches to blkif.h for example)
• Document xenstore paths used by guests and toolstack etc
• Xen command line options documentation in tree (started, but not complete)

Wiki Maintenance

Fix artcles that need attention

• Category:Contains_Needs_Action - Pages that need fixing
• Category:Contains_Needs_Formatting - Pages that need formatting
• Special:WantedPages - Missing pages (many may just need to be migrated), some may be obsolete

Review Categorization

We need to go through some of the categies on the http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Main_Page and decise whether there are documents in each category that need to be highlighted in a trail, etc.

Loose ends on migration

• Migrate remaining wiki pages (see Wiki_Community/Migration_Instructions_from_Old_to_New_Xen_Wiki)