[Xen-devel] Xen 4.5 development update

[konrad.wilk@xxxxxxxxxx]

Below is a summary of the projects / features being worked on for the 4.5
time frame.  The tentative feature freeze is scheduled for September 10th,
which is months away.  With that in mind, I think it's time to take
stock of the development, so we know whether to ask for more help or divert
resources.

The "prognosis" is now the likelihood of completion in the 4.5 timeframe.
Instead of values (0->100) it is now five states:

none - nothing yet
fair - still working on it, patches are prototypes or RFC
ok   - patches posted, acting on review
good - some last minute pieces
done - all done, might have bugs


For items involving code hosted on the Xen.org site (including qemu-xen),
that means a likelihood of having the feature code-complete and mostly
working by the feature freeze.  (It's OK if there are still bugs to be
worked out.)  For items in Linux, it would mean having items on track
to make it into the kernel released just after the scheduled 4.5 time frame.

Not exactly sure what that is in terms of libvirt.

= Timeline =

We are planning on a 9-month release cycle.  Based on that, below are
our estimated dates:

* Feature Freeze: 10th September 2014
* First RC: 10th October
* Release: 10th December 2014

The RCs and release will of course depend on stability and bugs, and
will therefore be fairly unpredictable.  The feature freeze may be
slipped for especially important features which are near completion.

= Prognosis =

The states are: none -> fair -> ok -> good -> done

none - nothing yet
fair - still working on it, patches are prototypes or RFC
ok   - patches posted, acting on review
good - some last minute pieces
done - all done, might have bugs


= Open =

== ARM ==

*  ARM - Device assigment on ARM (good)
   RFC for the hypervisor side sent.
   Linux parts at risk.
  -  Julien Grall

*  ARM XEN_DOMCTL_memory_mapping hypercall for ARM (good)
  -  Arianna Avanzini

*  ARM Xen UEFI booting on ARM (ok)
   RFC posted
  -  Roy Franz

*  ARM PSCI v0.2 (good)
   v2 posted
  -  Parth Dixit

*  ARM GICv3 support (ok)
   Split in two patchsets: v6a and v6
   v7a posted which does GIC and VGIC code refactoring
  -  Vijay Kilari

*  ARM GICv2m support (none)
  -  Linaro (unknown)

*  ARM VM save/restore/live migration (ok)
  -  Junghyun Yoo

*  ARM remote processor iommu module (GPUs + IPUs) (ok)
  -  Andrii Tseglytskyi

*  ARM: Use super pages in p2m  (ok)
   v4 posted
  -  Ian Campbell

*  ARM DRA7 support (ok)
  -  Andrii Tseglytskyi

*  ARM - MiniOS (ok)
   v5 posted
  -  Thomas Leonard

== x86 ==

*  New migration. (ok)
   tmem&remus need work
   libxc is RFC
  -  Andrew Cooper & David Vrabel

*  PVH - AMD hardware support. (fair)
   Issues with FSBASE MSRs
  -  Mukesh Rathor

*  Xen multiboot2-EFI support (fair)
   Needed for SecureBoot
  -  Daniel Kiper

*  Xen HPET interrupt fixes (fair)
   behind migration v2
  -  Andrew Cooper

*  HT enabled, virtualization overhead is high (Xen 4.4) (none)
   kernbench demonstrated it
   looking and tracing it
  -  Dario Faggioli

*  IOMMU ABI for guests to map their DMA regions (fair)
  -  Malcolm Crossley

*  dirty vram / IOMMU bug (fair)
  -  Zhang, Yang Z

*  Convert tasklet to per-cpu tasklets (fair)
  -  Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk

*  VMware backdoor (hypercall) (ok)
   Needs to be split up and redone
  -  Don Slutz

*  VPMU - 'perf' support in Xen (good)
   v5 posted
  -  Boris Ostrovsky

*  Soft affinity for vcpus (was NUMA affinity for vcpus) (good)
   v11 posted
  -  Dario Faggioli

*  Cache QoS Monitoring - hypercalls (fair)
   Just hypercalls - no toolstack changes.
   v11 posted
  -  Dongxiao Xu and Shantong Kang

*  HVM guest NUMA (none)
  -  Matt Wilson

*  1TB slow destruction (ok)
  -  Bob Liu

*  extending mem_access support to PV domain (fair)
  -  Aravindh Puthiyaparambil (aravindp)

*  Stability fix (good)
  -  Jan Beulich

*  Support controlling the max C-state sub-state (ok)
   v3 posted
  -  Ross Lagerwall

*  Repurpose SEDF Scheduler for Real-time (ok)
   RFC patch posted (v1)
  -  Joshua Whitehead, Robert VanVossen

== QEMU ==

*  Rebase of QEMU 2.0 and SeaBIOS (fair)
  -  Ian Jackson

*  Using qemu-upstream in a stubdomain (fair)
  -  Ian Jackson

*  Intel IGD PCI GPU passthrough (ok)
   v5 posted
  -  Chen, Tiejun

*  AMD Radeon PCI GPU passthrough (none)
   Focusing on Xen 4.2 and qemu-traditional
  -  Kelly Zytaruk

*  vNUMA in Xen (ok)
   git://gitorious.org/xenvnuma_v5/xenvnuma_v5.git
  -  Elena Ufimtseva

== lib{xc,xl} and toolstack ==

*  libxl/xl - xm compatibility mode for mem-max and mem-set; (ok)
  -  Daniel Kiper

*  Rearrange and cleanup installation destination directories (/var -> 
var/lib/xen) (fair)
  -  Daniel Kiper

*  libxl work - JSON to keep track of guest configs (ok)
  -  Wei Liu

*  pvscsi should be targeted for 4.5, a prototype exists (fair)
  -  Olaf Hering

*  xl list --long (and some related xl commands) have some bugs (none)
  -  Zhigang Wang

*  PVH - Migration of PVH DomUs. (none)
   Depends on migration2 code
  -  Roger Pau Monné

*  PVH - Migration of guests from a PVH dom0  (none)
   Depends on migration2 code
  -  Roger Pau Monné

*  xl does not handle migrate interruption gracefully (none)
   If you start a localhost migrate, and press "Ctrl-C" in the middle, you get 
two hung domains
  -  Ian Jackson

*  Remus in Xen (ok)
   url: https://github.com/laijs/xen remus-v13
  -  Gui Jianfeng
  -  Yang Hongyang
  -  Dong, Eddie

*  COLO in Xen (fair)
  -  Gui Jianfeng
  -  Yang Hongyang
  -  Dong, Eddie

*  systemd support (ok)
   v6
  -  Luis R. Rodriguez

*  snapshot API extension (checkpointing disk) (ok)
  -  Bamvor Jian Zhang

*  extend the xenstore ring with a 'closing' signal
   RFC patch posted
  -  David Scott

== Linux ==

*  Linux block multiqueue (fair)
  -  Arianna Avanzini

*  Netback grant table manipulations (ok)
  -  Zoltan Kiss

*  VPMU - 'perf' support in Linux (ok)
   Depends on Xen patches
  -  Boris Ostrovsky

*  vNUMA in Linux (ok)
   git://gitorious.org/xenvnuma_v5/xenvnuma_v5.git
  -  Elena Ufimtseva

*  vsyscall in Linux (fair)
  -  Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk

*  Linux pvops of Xen EFI hypercall support (good)
  -  Daniel Kiper

*  COLO Agent in Linux (fair)
  -  Gui Jianfeng
  -  Yang Hongyang
  -  Dong, Eddie

*  vAPIC in PVHVM guests (Linux side) (none)
  -  Boris Ostrovsky

*  pvSCSI (ok)
   Initial patch posted.
  -  Juergen Gross

== FreeBSD ==

*  PVH FreeBSD dom0 (ok)
   FreeBSD 11 goal. Toolstack side done in Xen 4.5
  -  Roger Pau Monné

== Other OSes (MiniOS, QNX) ==

*  PV drivers for automotive kernels (fair)
  -  Artem Mygaiev

*  mini-os: xenbus changes for rump kernels (ok)
   git://xenbits.xen.org/people/iwj/rumpuser-xen.git
   branch: base.dev-xen-xenbus.v1..dev-xen-xenbus.v1
  -  Ian Jackson

== GRUB2 ==

*  GRUB2 multiboot2 (fair)
  -  Daniel Kiper

== OSSTEST ==

*  OSSTest: libvirt (good)
  -  Ian Campbell

== Deferred to Xen 4.6 ==

*  Default to credit2 (none)
   cpu pinning, numa affinity and cpu reservation
  -  George Dunlap

*  "Short" grant copy (just header) of packets. (none)
  -  Zoltan Kiss

*  cpuid leveling (none)
   
http://xenbits.xen.org/people/andrewcoop/feature-levelling/feature-levelling-D.pdf
  -  Andrew Cooper

*  live migration knobs, there is no suitable code yet, just ideas (none)
    http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2014-03/msg00785.html
  -  Olaf Hering

*  Further tmem cleanups/fixes (16TB etc) (fair)
  -  Bob Liu

== Up for grabs ==

*  PoD fixes
   if you boot with memory <= maxmem we have a size estimation bug

*  TLB flushing without locks in Xen

*  xl does not support specifying virtual function for passthrough device
   http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/bug/22

*  PCI hole resize support hvmloader/qemu-traditional/qemu-upstream with 
PCI/GPU passthrough
   http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/bug/28

*  libx{c,l} error handling cleanup

*  Adding missing 'xend' features in libxl

*  xl list -l on a dom0-only system

*  xl list -l doesn't contain tty console port

*  xl: passing more defaults in configuration in xl.conf
   There are a number of options for which it might be useful to pass a default 
in xl.conf.  For example, if we could have a default "backend" parameter for 
vifs, then it would be easy to switch back and forth between a backend in a 
driver domain and a backend in dom0.

*  PVH - PVH working with shadow.
   Based on Tim's work

*  PVH - PCI passthrough for DomU.

*  AMD performance regressions

*  Performance due to hypercall preemption. More preemptions - slower. (none)

== Completed ==

*  alternative_asm in Xen (done)
  -  Feng Wu

*  SMAP (done)
  -  Feng Wu

*  Re-write of vHPET (done)
   aka hvm/hpet: Detect comparator values in the past
  -  Don Slutz

*  vAPIC in PVHVM guests (Xen side) (done)
  -  Boris Ostrovsky

*  libvirt and xl discard support, so that libvirt can start using it (done)
  -  Olaf Hering

*  Xen PVH dom0 (done)
  -  Mukesh Rathor

*  Linux PVH dom0 (done)
  -  Mukesh Rathor

*  OSSTest: upstream QEMU (done)
  -  Ian Campbell

*  amd_ucode cleanups, verify patch size(enhancement) (mostly in master except 
one patch)

*  Data breakpoint Extension support (new-feat) (in master)

*  Feature masking MSR support (enhancement) (in master)

*  Support BRCM TruManage chip (Serial over LAN support) (new-feat) (in master)

*  fix vmce_amd* functions, unify mce_amd mcheck initialization (fixes/cleanups)
  -  Aravind and Suravee

*  NUMA memory scrubbing (done)
  -  Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk

*  ARM  - IOMMU support (done)
  -  Julien Grall

*  ioreq-server, aka secondary emulators (done)
  -  Paul Durrant

*  Netback multiqueue (good)
  -  Wei Liu

*  ARM Interrupt latency reduction (no maintenance interrupts) (good)
  -  Stefano Stabellini

*  Bigger PCI hole in QEMU (done)
   Needs to be rebased
  -  Don Slutz

*  rework VM Generation ID (ok)
   v7 posted
  -  David Vrabel


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