Re: [Xen-devel] Xen 4.3 release planning proposal

[Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik@xxxxxx>]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 05:46:59PM +0100, George Dunlap wrote:
> 
> 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
> 

<snip>

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

xm/xend PVUSB works for both PV and HVM guests, so xl should support PVUSB for 
both PV and HVM guests aswell.
James Harper's GPLPV drivers actually do have PVUSB frontend driver for Windows.

Also Suse's xenlinux forward-ported patches have PVUSB support in 
unmodified_drivers for HVM guests.


Another USB item:

* xl support for USB device passthru using QEMU emulated USB for HVM guests (no 
need for PVUSB drivers in the HVM guest).
  This works today in xm/xend with qemu-traditional, but is limited to USB 1.1, 
probably because 
  the old version of Qemu-dm-traditional which lacks USB 2.0/3.0.
  So xl support for emulated USB device passthru for both qemu-upstream and 
qemu-traditional.


More wishlist items:

* Nested hardware virtualization. Important for easier testing and development 
of Xen (Xen-on-Xen),
  and for running other hypervisors in Xen VMs. Interesting for labs, POCs, etc.

* VGA/GPU passthru support for AMD/NVIDIA; lots of patches on xen-devel 
archives, 
  but noone has yet stepped up to clean up and get them merged. 
  Currently Intel gfx passthru patches are merged to Xen, but primary 
ATI/NVIDIA require extra patches.
  This is actually something that a LOT of users ask often, it's discussed 
almost every day on ##xen on IRC.
  I wonder if XenClient folks could help here? 

* Dom0 Keyboard/mouse sharing to HVM guests; mainly needed by VGA/GPU passthru 
users.
  Fujitsu guys posted some patches for this in 2010, and XenClient guys in 2009 
(iirc),
  but nothing got further developed and merged to upstream Xen.

* QXL virtual GPU support for SPICE. Someone was already developing this, 
  and posted patches earlier during 4.2 development cycle to xen-devel. 
  Upstream Qemu includes QXL support.

* PVSCSI support in XL. James Harper was (semi) interested in working with this,
  because he has a PVSCSI frontend driver in Windows GPLPV drivers, and he's 
using PVSCSI for tape backups himself.

* libvirt libxl driver improvements; support more Xen features. 
  Allows better using the Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora/RHEL/CentOS "default" 
virtualization GUI also with Xen.


Hopefully we'll find interested developers for these items :)


-- Pasi


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