GSoC Introduction: Add Xen PV block device support to SeaBIOS

[Daniel Castro <evil.dani@gmail.com>]

Good Day to all,

My Name is Daniel Castro I am going to be your google coder for this summer in:

Add Xen PV block device support to SeaBIOS

About Me:
This is my first time in Google Summer of Code and my first time
contributing to an open source project. I hope I will keep
contributing for many years to come to Xen Hypervisor. I was born and
raised in Colombia and currently a PhD candidate in South Korea. I
worked with Citrix XenServer for several years, but never worked with
the open source version, and I have big expectations for Xen.

The Project:
Currently Xen is using for HVM Virtual machines a version of BIOS
called  ROMBIOS. Xen is going to introduce SeaBIOS (and upstream
qemu), which happens to also be the qemu upstream and KVM BIOS of
Choice. Then a modification to SeaBIOS hard drive abstract layer will
be done to use the PV Drivers instead of the emulated device used in
qemu-dm.
Once SeaBIOS is in place my work starts as follows:
We are going to provide PV frontend drivers for SeaBIOS in order to
discourage the use of the emulated device. Removing the emulated
device also removes the subtle confusion that can arise from booting
from one device (emulated) but (apparently) running from another (PV
frontend).  Around July we will present the community with a patch(s)
that will enable to test this new functionality. Test for each kind of
VM  (Windows HVM VMs) will be done and a compatibility matrix will be
presented as part of the usual documentation.
All activities and reports will be posted on:
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/SeaBIOS

All questions or/and suggestions are very welcome,
Thank you,
Daniel

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| |   | Daniel Castro,                |
| |   | Consultant/Programmer.|
| |   | U Andes                         |
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