[Qemu-devel] GSOC 2011

[Qemu-devel] GSOC 2011

[yajin]

Hi all,

I have proposed an idea of GSOC 2011 about adding KVM support to MIPS
architecture. I have solid experience on MIPS architecture and
familiar with qemu. I am very interested in this project.

According to the GSOC, there should be a mentor to each participating
project. Is there anyone interested to be the mentor of this project?
I would be honored to work with you.


Thanks & Regards

--

yajin

[Qemu-devel] Re: GSOC 2011

[Aurelien Jarno]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 07:32:31PM -0500, yajin wrote:
> Hi all,

Hi,

> I have proposed an idea of GSOC 2011 about adding KVM support to MIPS
> architecture. I have solid experience on MIPS architecture and
> familiar with qemu. I am very interested in this project.

Having KVM support for MIPS would be really great. AFAIK there is not
hardware virtualization support on MIPS (except if you plan to use the
supervisor mode for that), so how do you plan to proceed here? Executing
everything in user mode and emulating the trapped instructions? MIPS is
using a split address space depending on the mode, so that may not be
that easy.

All of that to say it would be nice to have a more detailed description
about such a GSOC, describing the your exact plans with a rough 
timeline. This is especially true, given that adding support for a new
architecture in KVM seems to be a huge task for a GSOC.

The best is probably to fill a new entry on the wiki, at this address:

  http://wiki.qemu.org/Google_Summer_of_Code_2011

> According to the GSOC, there should be a mentor to each participating
> project. Is there anyone interested to be the mentor of this project?
> I would be honored to work with you.

I know almost nothing about KVM, so if we go for a GSOC about adding KVM
support to MIPS, it would be nice to have another mentor who have a good
knowledge about KVM. I am pretty fine with the MIPS part though.

Aurelien

-- 
Aurelien Jarno                          GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
aurelien@aurel32.net                 http://www.aurel32.net

[Qemu-devel] Re: GSOC 2011 (KVM for MIPS)

[Jan Kiszka]

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On 2011-02-20 14:08, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 07:32:31PM -0500, yajin wrote:
>> Hi all,
> 
> Hi,
> 
>> I have proposed an idea of GSOC 2011 about adding KVM support to MIPS
>> architecture. I have solid experience on MIPS architecture and
>> familiar with qemu. I am very interested in this project.
> 
> Having KVM support for MIPS would be really great. AFAIK there is not
> hardware virtualization support on MIPS (except if you plan to use the
> supervisor mode for that), so how do you plan to proceed here? Executing
> everything in user mode and emulating the trapped instructions? MIPS is
> using a split address space depending on the mode, so that may not be
> that easy.
> 
> All of that to say it would be nice to have a more detailed description
> about such a GSOC, describing the your exact plans with a rough 
> timeline. This is especially true, given that adding support for a new
> architecture in KVM seems to be a huge task for a GSOC.

MontaVista has KVM for MIPS on their product slides [1]. Maybe someone
has a good contact to them and can poke for more details. They probably
won't offer it for direct download but need to distribute it to their
customers as open source anyway.

Jan

[1] http://www.mvista.com/product_detail_cge.php


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[Qemu-devel] Re: GSOC 2011 (KVM for MIPS)

[yajin]

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 9:16 AM, Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@web.de> wrote:
> On 2011-02-20 14:08, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 07:32:31PM -0500, yajin wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>>> I have proposed an idea of GSOC 2011 about adding KVM support to MIPS
>>> architecture. I have solid experience on MIPS architecture and
>>> familiar with qemu. I am very interested in this project.
>>
>> Having KVM support for MIPS would be really great. AFAIK there is not
>> hardware virtualization support on MIPS (except if you plan to use the
>> supervisor mode for that), so how do you plan to proceed here? Executing
>> everything in user mode and emulating the trapped instructions? MIPS is
>> using a split address space depending on the mode, so that may not be
>> that easy.
>>
>> All of that to say it would be nice to have a more detailed description
>> about such a GSOC, describing the your exact plans with a rough
>> timeline. This is especially true, given that adding support for a new
>> architecture in KVM seems to be a huge task for a GSOC.
>
> MontaVista has KVM for MIPS on their product slides [1]. Maybe someone
> has a good contact to them and can poke for more details. They probably
> won't offer it for direct download but need to distribute it to their
> customers as open source anyway.
>

Hi Jan,

Thanks very much for your information. I am not sure how they
distribute their source code. Anyone knows about that?

Jan, would you like to be one of the mentors of this project? Your
experience of KVM would be very helpful. Thanks

---
yajin

[Qemu-devel] Re: GSOC 2011 (KVM for MIPS)

[Jan Kiszka]

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On 2011-02-21 02:09, yajin wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 9:16 AM, Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@web.de> wrote:
>> On 2011-02-20 14:08, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
>>> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 07:32:31PM -0500, yajin wrote:
>>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>>> I have proposed an idea of GSOC 2011 about adding KVM support to MIPS
>>>> architecture. I have solid experience on MIPS architecture and
>>>> familiar with qemu. I am very interested in this project.
>>>
>>> Having KVM support for MIPS would be really great. AFAIK there is not
>>> hardware virtualization support on MIPS (except if you plan to use the
>>> supervisor mode for that), so how do you plan to proceed here? Executing
>>> everything in user mode and emulating the trapped instructions? MIPS is
>>> using a split address space depending on the mode, so that may not be
>>> that easy.
>>>
>>> All of that to say it would be nice to have a more detailed description
>>> about such a GSOC, describing the your exact plans with a rough
>>> timeline. This is especially true, given that adding support for a new
>>> architecture in KVM seems to be a huge task for a GSOC.
>>
>> MontaVista has KVM for MIPS on their product slides [1]. Maybe someone
>> has a good contact to them and can poke for more details. They probably
>> won't offer it for direct download but need to distribute it to their
>> customers as open source anyway.
>>
> 
> Hi Jan,
> 
> Thanks very much for your information. I am not sure how they
> distribute their source code. Anyone knows about that?
> 
> Jan, would you like to be one of the mentors of this project? Your
> experience of KVM would be very helpful. Thanks

Your project is really interesting. But given that my bandwidth is
limited and I've already a different project proposal filed, I can't
commit myself to this yet. I may serve as a backup mentor, but no
promises at this point.

Jan


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[Qemu-devel] Re: GSOC 2011

[yajin]

> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 07:32:31PM -0500, yajin wrote:
>> Hi all,
>
> Hi,
>
>> I have proposed an idea of GSOC 2011 about adding KVM support to MIPS
>> architecture. I have solid experience on MIPS architecture and
>> familiar with qemu. I am very interested in this project.
>
> Having KVM support for MIPS would be really great. AFAIK there is not
> hardware virtualization support on MIPS (except if you plan to use the
> supervisor mode for that), so how do you plan to proceed here? Executing
> everything in user mode and emulating the trapped instructions? MIPS is
> using a split address space depending on the mode, so that may not be
> that easy.

Hi Aurelien, thanks for your reply. You are right. MIPS does NOT have
hardware virtualization support currently. And I do not want to use
the supervisor thing because this mode has been deprecated. Supervisor
mode is now optional according to MIPS32 documents. So for the
privilege instructions, the trap-emulation is the easy way although
the performance may be not good. We may improve the performance after
make this work.

MIPS has an unique feature(or problem for virtualization) is that the
MMU is bypassed by kseg0(and kseg1), in which the kernel code is
residing. There are two possible solutions to this problem. The first
one is we can trap all the access of kseg0 to VMM. The second one is
to remap the guest kernel to other segment. This first one is
transparent to guest kernel. However it will cause tremendous
performance lost since the access of kseg0 is very common. The second
one needs to make a little changes to the link script of guest linux
kernel.

>
> All of that to say it would be nice to have a more detailed description
> about such a GSOC, describing the your exact plans with a rough
> timeline. This is especially true, given that adding support for a new
> architecture in KVM seems to be a huge task for a GSOC.
>
> The best is probably to fill a new entry on the wiki, at this address:
>
>  http://wiki.qemu.org/Google_Summer_of_Code_2011

I will make an entry on the wiki and keep it update.

>
>> According to the GSOC, there should be a mentor to each participating
>> project. Is there anyone interested to be the mentor of this project?
>> I would be honored to work with you.
>
> I know almost nothing about KVM, so if we go for a GSOC about adding KVM
> support to MIPS, it would be nice to have another mentor who have a good
> knowledge about KVM. I am pretty fine with the MIPS part though.
>

Thanks very much. Hope we can work together and make it happen.

-----

yajin