[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] [Xen-ia64-devel] Next phase of Xen/ia64 development...
There have been a number of solid contributions by many people to get Xen/ia64 to where it is today. You should all be very proud! I believe the next phase of Xen/ia64 development will need to be focused on the end user of Xen/ia64. What can we do to put a useful Xen/ia64 into the hands of Itanium system owners who want the functionality of Xen, but who are not interested in development or tracking the latest upstream changes? The top areas of development might be: 1) Stable domU. As some have noticed, domU is currently capable of getting to a single-user shell prompt and executing simple commands but, if it is exercised much, various programs crash possibly killing the guest, and in some cases even killing dom0. This is unacceptable for a "normal user". There are probably a few bugs in the virtual drivers and hypervisor, but these may be difficult to track down. We developers need to work together to identify reproducible test cases to help isolate and fix them. 2) Networking. A system without networking has little value to a real user. Most of the netback/netfront code should be fully leveragable. We need only identify the few changes necessary to adapt to ia64 differences. The patch I posted earlier this week should help us to move in the right direction. 3) A good regression test environment. Many of the bugs we are fixing are subtle corner cases which occur very rarely. When fixing these, it is very possible that another bug will be introduced that only occurs in another subtle corner case. We need to ensure that we continue forward progress. Once domU is usable to run real applications and networking is working and stable, I think the next steps are: 4) SMP guest support 5) Migration support 6) Performance tuning but these will be difficult (and ultimately futile) to work on without the stability and networking. Comments? Dan _______________________________________________ Xen-ia64-devel mailing list Xen-ia64-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.xensource.com/xen-ia64-devel
|
![]() |
Lists.xenproject.org is hosted with RackSpace, monitoring our |