Xen Maintainer, Committer and Developer Meeting/October 2012 Minutes

Attendees

Ian Campbell Andres Lagar-Cavilla Adin Scannell Boris Ostrovsky Sherry Hurwitz James Bulpin Ian Pratt Donald Dugger Jun Nakajima Kurt Hackel George Dunlap Matt Wilson

Apologies: Lars Kurth Jan Beulich Daniel De Graaf George Coker

Call membership

Welcomed new call members from AWS, Gridcentric and NSA.

ACTION: Lars to write up purpose of monthly call

Review ACTION items

Follow up on San Diego F2F meeting actions

• George has sent 4.3 list to xen-devel
  • if you are working on stuff not on the list let George know
• Future Direction of Xen and PV:
  • Konrad to summarize PV ops discussion from KS on xen-devel. Carried over
  • Konrad to make concrete proposals regarding PVH and PVOPS and disucss on list when appropriate in future. Carried over
• EFI secure boot:
  • Matt sent links to reference hardware a few weeks ago (DONE)
  • Best practice doc - Stefano added to list for next doc day (DONE)
    • Next doc day on October 29
  • On 4.3 todo list
• Nested virt
  • On list for 4.3
  • AMD support in 4.2? Not fully cooked, could declare as an experimental feature.
    • WinXP mode on Win7 is least stable case (but probably most

important)

• • • Working on making work for 4.3
  • Intel actively working on and testing nested support for 4.3
• NUMA working group - Lars checked, there is none (DONE)
• NUMA - link up with AnilM - interesting discussion but nothing for 4.3 timeframe (DONE)
• Guest NUMA - VMware vNUMA exists, vMotion works with it but afterwards the VM may not be optimised
  • Matt Wilson posted a link to a blog article on xen-devel
• Upstream kernel features
  • Intel are working on connecting up their Xen and Linux guys

Current technical challenges

• AMD (Boris): oprofile vs perf status?
  • Ideally perf on Xen would be feature comparable with on KVM
  • Is perf sample based like oprofile? Yes, but can also use performance counters
  • Sounds like this has no owner currently but Konrad and others would like to see it

Coordinate current and future work

• Uservoice.com: George setup xenorg.uservoice.com to supplement 4.3 planning.
  • Users can suggest new ideas and vote on them
  • Was put up mid-August and mentioned on lists.
  • ACTION George to blog about it
  • How do we get xen.org contributors to pick these items up?
  • Top features:
    • Boot HVM guests with pass-through for primary GPU
    • Storage motion (not sure if people want this for XCP or Xen+xl)
    • QXL GPU support for SPICE
    • PVSCSI
      • Konrad may have in a branch
        • Needs upstreaming to Linux
        • Need xl support for xend parity
    • libvirt driver enhancements (all libxl functionality in libvirt)
      • Talking to Suse about tracking their work
      • Suse are looking at this right now and have a team of devs on it

• 4.3
  • Gridcentric wants to see wait queue in h/v in 4.3
    • willing to work with Keir on this
    • ACTION Andres to follow up on xen-devel

• XSM doc project - Citrix employing a contractor to write wiki docs on use of XSM.
  • XenServer team (via James) can review - suggest also getting XenClient review