Re: Xen 4.3 release planning proposal

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

On 20/08/12 20:14, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> 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.

OK, I'll put that on the list.  Thanks.

> More wishlist items:

I'm going to be experimenting with a website designed for user feedback, 
to both suggest features but also to help prioritize what you think are 
the important features. Expect an e-mail in a day or two with the 
announcement.

I think the Citrix team is probably mostly full for this release cycle; 
so anything that requires significant development work but doesn't 
already have developers working on it will probably have to be put off 
until later, unless you can convince the regular devs it's something to 
prioritize, or you can bring in more developers to work on it. :-)

> * 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.

The ball is really in Intel / AMD's court on this one.  It's on our list 
of "things that might be nice", but given the other things we really do 
want to try to make into 4.3, wasn't that big of a priority for us.  If 
Intel or AMD want to make this a priority for them for 4.3, I can track it.

> * 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?

What kind of patches are these? Are they mostly to pvops Linux?

> * 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.

What exactly is involved here? If the work is mostly done, but just 
needs someone to dust it off and submit it, then it's probably something 
we can add to the list.

> * 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.

If "someone" wants to step up and claim responsibility, I'll put it on 
the list of things to track. :-)

> * 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.

This is pretty important.  Looking at feature parity between libvirt+KVM 
and libvirt+Xen on the Citrix xen.org to-do list, but to begin with it's 
more of a research than a feature, so wasn't on this particular list.  
If you happen to know a specific list of missing features, that might be 
something we could try to fit in for 4.3.

  -George