Xen Document Days/TODO

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Requested Documentation

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Big work items

• 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.
• A Xen/XCP 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.
• 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
• 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

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

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?
• 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

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.

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)