Re: Xen 4.3 development update, and stock-taking

[George Dunlap <george.dunlap@eu.citrix.com>]

On 18/01/13 15:41, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
>> Konrad Wilk: Persistent net grants, multi-page network, multi-page blk
> a) persistent-page grants are in the Linux kernel.
>
> b) Multi-page network and persistent net grants.
> Annie is doing a hollistic look at the network stack
> and is going to setup a collaboration meeting between interested parties
> (for right now I think it is Intel, Citrix, Amazon, SuSE, and Oracle)
> to collaborate on that. There are multiple items in this and it would
> be good that we don't step on each other toes.
>
>
> c) Mutli-page block. That kind of morphed in me taking a hard look at the
> block protocol itself and how we can fix this and other.
>
> http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2012-12/msg01346.html
>
> Need more people to disuss and make sure we are actually on the
> same page on the issues I enumerated.
>
>> Jim Fehlig: libvirt migration support
>>
>> Matthew Fioravante: vTPM
> He posted some patches for the Linux kernel, but they need some tweaking.
> ..
>> == Not yet complete ==
>>
>> * PVH mode (w/ Linux)
>>    owner: mukesh@oracle
>>    status (Linux): 3rd draft patches posted.
>>    status (Xen): RFC submitted
>>    prognosis: Good
> The Linux side is good. The Xen hypervisor side needs reviews and
> foremost the new hypercall needs to be set in stone (otherwsie
> the Linux patches need to be redone).

OK -- the main question for planning purposes is, does it seem like we 
can get this sorted out by the scheduled feature freeze on March 25?  At 
the moment I'm going to leave this as "Good".

>
>
> .. snip..
>> * Persistent grants for net
>>    owner: annie.li@citrix
>>    status: Initial implementation posted
>>    prognosis: ?
> Shelved. The perf reports with Xen 4.2 did not show much improvement.
> They should have but there is something amiss.
>
> goto b;

OK -- so I'll put this down as "Not for 4.3".

>> * Multi-page blk rings (external)
>>   - blkback in kernel (konrad@oracle, ?@intel)
>>   - qemu blkback
>>    status: Not started.
>>    prognosis: UNKNOWN
> goto c;

OK -- we still have a bit of time, so I'll leave this with Roger's 
assessment of "Fair" for now.  We can always review the assessment later.

>> * Multi-page net protocol (external)
>>    owner: ijc@citrix or annie.li@oracle
>>    status: Initial patches posted (by Wei Liu)
>>    expand the network ring protocol to allow multiple pages for
>>    increased throughput
> goto b;

OK -- I'll mark this as "Poor".

> We might also put on this list:
>
>   - hardware performance counters.
>    Investigate what is important.

This seems a bit to vague.  How do I know when it can be crossed off? :-)

  -George