[Xen-devel] Xen 4.3 release planning proposal

[George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone!  With the completion of our first few release candidates
for 4.2, it's time to look forward and start planning for the 4.3
release.  I've volunteered to step up and help coordinate the release
for this cycle.

The 4.2 release cycle this time has been nearly a year and a half.
One of the problems with having such a long release is that people who
get in features early have to wait a long time for that feature to be
in a published version; they then have to wait even longer for it to
be part of a released distribution.  Historically the cycle has been
around 9 months, but this has not been made explicit.  Many people
(including myself) think that the 9 month release cycle was a good
cadence that we should aim for.

So I propose that we move to a time-based release schedule.  Rather
than aiming for a release date, I propose that we aim to do a "feature
freeze" six months after the 4.2 release -- that would be around March
1, 2013.  That way we'll probably end up releasing in 9 months' time,
around June 2013.  This is one of the things we can discuss at the Dev
Meeting before the Xen Summit next week.  If you have other opinions,
please let us know.

I will also be tracking ahead of time many of the features and
improvements that we want to try to get into 4.3.  Below is a list of
high-level features and improvements that the Citrix Xen.org team are
either planning on working on ourselves, or are aware of other people
working on, and that we should reasonably be able to get into the 4.3
release.  Most of them have owners, but many do not yet; volunteers
are welcome.

If you are planning on working any features not listed that you would like
to have tracked, please let me know.

I will be sending tracking updates similar to Ian Campbell's 4.2
release updates.  I think to begin with, weekly may be a bit
excessive.  I'll probably go for bi-weekly, and switch to weekly after
the feature freeze.

It should be noted this is not an exhaustive list, nor an immutable
one.  Our main priority will be to release within 9 months; only a
very important feature indeed would cause us to slip the release.

Features and improvements not on this list are of course welcome at
any time before the feature freeze.

Any questions and feedback are welcome!

Your 4.3 release coordinator,
 George Dunlap

* Event channel scalability
  owner: attilio@citrix
  Increase limit on event channels (currently 1024 for 32-bit guests,
  4096 for 64-bit guests)

* NUMA scheduler affinity
  owner: dario@citrix

* NUMA Memory migration
  owner: dario@citrix

* PVH mode, domU (w/ Linux)
  owner: mukesh@oracle

* PVH mode, dom0 (w/ Linux)
  owner: mukesh@oracle

* ARM server port
  owner: @citrix

* blktap3
  owner: @citrix

* Default to QEMU upstream
 - qemu-based stubdom (Linux or BSD libc)
    owner: anthony@citrix
    qemu-upstream needs a more fully-featured libc than exists in
    minios.  Either work on a minimalist linux-based stubdom with
    glibc, or port one of the BSD libcs to minios.

 - pci pass-thru
    owner: anthony@citrix

* Persistent grants
  owner: @citrix

* Multi-page blk rings
 - blkback in kernel (@intel)
 - qemu blkback

* Multi-page net protocol
  owner: ?
  expand the network ring protocol to allow multiple pages for
  increased throughput

* xl vm-{export,import}
  owner: ?
  Allow xl to import and export VMs to other formats; particularly
  ovf, perhaps the XenServer format, or more.


* xl USB pass-through for PV guests
  owner: ?
  Port the xend PV pass-through functionality to xl.

* openvswitch toostack integration
  owner: roger@citrix

* Rationalized backend scripts (incl. driver domains)
  owner: roger@citrix

* Full-VM snapshotting
  owner: ?
  Have a way of coordinating the taking and restoring of VM memory and
  disk snapshots.  This would involve some investigation into the best
  way to accomplish this.

* VM Cloning
  owner: ?
  Again, a way of coordinating the memory and disk aspects.  Research
  into the best way to do this would probably go along with the
  snapshotting feature.

* Make storage migration possible
  owner: ?
  There needs to be a way, either via command-line or via some hooks,
  that someone can build a "storage migration" feature on top of libxl
  or xl.

* PV audio (audio for stubdom qemu)
  owner: stefano.panella@citrix

* Memory: Replace PoD with paging mechanism
  owner: george@citrix

* Managed domains?

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