Archived/GSoC 2012 Ideas

Project Ideas for GSoC 2012

This page is used to list project ideas for Google Summer of Code (GSOC) 2012.

Unfortunately, Xen.org did not get accepted as mentoring organization in 2012.

Key Google Pages

• GSoC Home Page
• GSoC 2012 timeline

Project Ideas

Rules

• Be creative
• Be specific: what do you want to be implemented; if at all possible provide an indication of size and complexity as described above to make it easier for a student to choose ideas
• If you are willing to mentors those ideas, add your name and email to the idea.
• If you're an interested student, add your name and email next to the idea. It is ok to have several students interested by one idea.
• Aspiring students need to get in touch with the xen.org community manager via community.manager@xen.org to register their interest

New Project Ideas

Please add new ideas with a description or mail community.manager@xen.org if in doubt. - This is now open for 2012 GSoC!

Description	Project	Possible Mentor(s)	Size, Knowledge required	Detailed Description	Possible Student(s)
<Your Idea>	<Your Project; e.g. Xen or XCP or XenARM or... >	<mentor contact info>	<skills required: e.g. Qemu, Xen, Linux>	<description of the project idea>	<student contact info>
TRIM support for xen virtual block device	blktap2, xenblk	George Shuklin <shuklin@selectel.ru>	Size:small, Linux block drivers, generic system programming	If xenblk supported TRIM operation, it would've allowed to let backend to know about 'unused space'. In this case thin provision whould be bi-directional, providing way to 'shrink' overgrown thin-provisioned disk of virtual machine.	This is already implemented - it is called 'discard'
Port XCP Toolstack to ARM (unconfirmed)	XCP	Mike McClurg <mike.mcclurg@citrix.com>	Size: Medium/Large. Knowledge: Debian packaging; compiling for Linux on ARM; basic C, Python and OCaml	A team of core Xen engineers has just finished porting the Xen hypervisor to the unreleased ARM A15 platform. In preparation for new A15 hardware, we'd like to make sure that the XCP toolstack runs on on current ARM hardware in emulated-Xen mode. This project would involve modifying the XCP toolstack build system to run on current ARM hardware, and produce an XCP toolstack that will run in emulated-Xen mode.
Virtulazation of the CPU Performance Monitoring Unit (unconfirmed)	XCP	Marcus Granado <marcus.granado@citrix.com>	Size: Unknown. Skills: C, kernel/hypervisor hackery	Right now, the CPU PMU (performance monitoring unit) is not virtualized, therefore in general it is not possible to run hardware counter profilers (such as Linux oprofile, FreeBSD hwpmc or similar tools for Windows) inside guest domains. The goal of the project would be to allow these hardware counter profilers to run inside guest domains.
Improvement of OpenXenManager, the XCP GUI	XCP	Mike McClurg <mike.mcclurg@citrix.com>	Size: Medium. Knowledge: Python and GTK	OpenXenManager is a free, open-source, multi-platform GUI for both Xen Cloud Platform and XenServer. It has many nice features, but could use some bug fixes and new features.
"Segment Clean" & "Cache" feather of HLFS which is sub-project of Cloudxy	XEN, XCP, BLKTAP2, Hadoop	Chen Lijun <cljcore@126.com> Kang Hua <kanghua151@gmail.com>	Size: Medium. Knowledge: C, block driver, File system and HDFS	HLFS, sub-project of Cloudxy, is a distributed vm image storage system for XEN. HLFS(Hadoop Log Structure Filesystem,actually named Hadoop Log Structure Block System is more proper) provides highly available block level storage volumes that can be attached to XEN virtual machines by its tapdisk driver — Similar projects in KVM region is sheepdog，however in different architecture. For details, you can visit http://code.google.com/p/cloudxy/wiki/WHAT_IS_CLOUDXY or http://code.google.com/p/cloudxy (In Chinese). We hope to accomplish two features, which are "clean segment under tree snapshots" feature and "block cache and write-back" feather during GSOC 2012. The first one will involve: 1. Implement mechanism of segment clean - it involves "mid-snapshot segment clean" and "over-snapshot segment clean". so you can do it in normal way(pull data) and "map/reduce" way. 2. Implement strategy of segment clean - it will take into account that how to avoid IO contention between clean operation and vm disk access operation. You can visit http://code.google.com/p/cloudxy/wiki/HlfsDesign_English_Version for more details about HLFS's realize mechanisms. Another one will involve: 1. Read and write cache management - include cache replacement mechanism. 2. Write-back management - include gather more block to write for reducing write operations.	Harry Wei <harryxiyou@gmail.com> Kelvin <senwang@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Zhang Zhang <zhang_zhang@live.com>
xl to xapi offline VM migration utility	Xen, XCP	Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com>	Userspace C experience, Ocaml (optionally)	Develop a utility which can take an xl style VM configuration file and import its configuration (including disk contents) into a system running the xapi toolstack (e.g. Ubuntu or Debian using Project_Kronos or an XCP system.
Perf support for Xen	Linux	Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>	Linux, Intel SDM	The upstream kernel has not support for using the CONFIG_PERF API with guests. It does not even work properly within the initial domain (dom0). Work would be required to figure out the current bugs in the Linux kernel that make perf not work properly and then implement support to do performance tracing of guests.