Xen Roadmap/4.0 Feature Requests List

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Xen Roadmap

Xen 4.0 Feature Requests List

Here is the active Xen 4.0 Feature Requests

  • Robert Dunkley ( Robert@saq.co.uk ) - RDMA Live Migration Support (allow for faster and smoohter live migration when

using Infiniband or Iwarp NICS)

  • Luke Crawford ( lsc@prgmr.com ) - Dom0 kernel in Linux 2.6.30 kernel and Marvell 6480 disk driver
  • Franz Von Hahn [ franz.vonhahn@yahoo.de ] - stable support for passing through usb-controllers/devices and pci-devices for paravirtualized guests would be really great.
  • Fault Tolerance - Project Remus and/or Kemari
  • Kashif Ali ( kashif_quaidian@hotmail.com ) - Monitor, Limit, & Control network traffic coming at DomUs
  • Nathan Stratton [ nathan@robotics.net ] - RDMA infiniband support for migration
  • Ramachandran Radhakrishnan [ rama.radha@gmail.com ] - Internationalization / Unicode support
  • Alessandro R. [ lord2y@gmail.com ] - A tool that permit to configure virtual bridge like real switch (e.g.

control VLAN, port status etc.); VLan tagging per NIC in the VM config file; Xen with a Virtual Ethernet Switch (like VDE2)? You can create a switch per client ; from Kieran Mansley [ kmansley@solarflare.com ] : With Xen (and other virtualisation technologies) users often end up with a set of bridges, v-switches, hardware switches, and now switches (albeit limited in capabilities) in virtualisation-aware NICs. It would be very useful to develop a control plane over all these devices to allow them to be sensibly configured from a single point. I know there are some people working on bits of this problem but bringing it all together to work on Xen, using open APIs and protocols so that other technologies could be easily integrated, would help a lot.

  • Dong Wei ( dong.wei@hp.com ) - the physical Xen boot/install support via native UEFI (pUEFI) and virtual UEFI (vUEFI) support
  • Thiago Camargo Martins Cordeiro [ thiagocmartinsc@gmail.com ]- Virtual Ethernet Switch, virtual uplinks (through SSH, for example), virtual cables, virtual plugs, so I can create a virtual switch per client on each of my dom0 of my cluster, or maybe it needs a easy way to integrate itself with VDE2.
  • Philipp Schmid ( schmidp@schmidp.com ) - Limit I/O for individual disks of VM (similar to credit scheduler weight)
  • Francesco Gallo ( cluster@xinet.it ) - Dynamic Memoery Management for Overcommitting RAM
  • Sander Eikelenboom [ linux@eikelenboom.it ] - as many others .. VGA (pci-e/pci) passthrough, complete USB passthrough, (also working for webcams/videograbbers etc) ; i'm currently working with "USB over IP" from the http://usbip.sourceforge.net/ project. It is working fine for printers/scanners, and almost perfect for webcam (some little distortion left). But functionality within XEN would be better.
  • Paul Schulze [ avlex@gmx.net ] - Fully functional USB passthrough would be really nice to have, but to be useful, I would also like to also request some sort of device management, that allows automatically assigning devices to a DomU whenever it is connected and a way to have unknown devices assigned to a default DomU. Otherwise, interaction on the Dom0 will be needed for each and every time, a device is connected; Comments form Sander Eikelenboom [ linux@eikelenboom.it ] Good point, some good and flexible management would be nice to have too. USBIP at the moment can handle:

- remove binding to currently loaded modules - binding to usbip at plugin time In some quite simple userspace management tools. For xen it think xend would be the place for normal rules, and xm for hotplug ? It would be nice if you could make the rules for usb passthrough match with both usb port numbers as well as device id's, perhaps even with wildcards.

  • Tim Moore ( timothy.moore@expidas.net ) - PCI CGA Passthrough for VT-d (vendor cards like Nvidia, AIT, etc);
    • XCI Workaround in Xen (Jean Guyader - jean.guyader@gmail.com )
  • Paul Schulze ( avlex82@googlemail.com ) - Full AMD IOMMU SUpport
  • Pasi Karkkainen ( pasik@iki.fi ) - Online resizing of DomU Disks - see
  • Mike Dickson ( mike.dickson@hp.com ) - I'd like to see some emphasis put on cross compiling Xen and modular builds. I
    • have a functional environment now cross compiling Xen 3.3.1 using the OpenEmbedded tool stack (this was inspired by the XenClient work and buildroot but my work is focused on the server side). Getting it to work was a bit of a challenge (and a few patches) as not all the pieces are really designed to be split apart and cross-compiled separately. The current approach which downloads all the separate bits is nice for some cases but ideally I'd like to be able to separately build the various pieces in modular fashion. And cross compile it as well so I can control the compilation environment separately from what the build host is running.


Latest version: File:Xen Roadmap Nov 2008.pdf

Previous version: File:Xen Roadmap Jul 2006.pdf