Xen Project Hypervisor Roadmap/4.5

Rather than try to predict precisely what will make it into what release, we are following an approach from the Agile world and call all uncompleted features the "Backlog". We are however keeping track who is doing what, what is completed and what is almost completed in this wiki page. For ongoing work check out the Process section of this document.

Release Manager

We confirmed Konrad Wilk from Oracle as Release Manager for Xen 4.5 : see this e-mail thread

Roadmap

As in the past, roadmap discussions will mostly happen on the xen-devel mailing list (see below). The convention is that our release manager will regularly post an e-mail called Xen 4.5 development update on the xen-devel list and that community members respond to it.

4.5 Timeline

We are planning on a 9-month release cycle. Our current estimated dates:

• Feature Freeze: 10th September 2014
• First RC: 10th October
• Release: 10th December 2014

The RCs and release will of course depend on stability and bugs, and may therefore be adjusted as we get closer to the freeze dates. The feature freeze may be slipped for especially important features which are near completion.

Running Roadmap Updates on xen-devel

See

• Xen 4.5 Development Update (June)
• Xen 4.5 Development Update (May)
• historical 4.4 roadmap discussions

Committed Items (as per June)

• alternative_asm in Xen (done) - Feng Wu

• SMAP (done) - Feng Wu

• Re-write of HPET (done) - Don Slutz

• vAPIC in PVHVM guests (done) - Boris Ostrovsky

• libvirt and xl discard support, so that libvirt can start using it (done) - Olaf Hering

• Xen PVH dom0 (done) - Mukesh Rathor

• Linux PVH dom0 (done) - Mukesh Rathor

• OSSTest: upstream QEMU (done) - Ian Campbell

• amd_ucode cleanups, verify patch size(enhancement) (mostly in master except one patch)

• Data breakpoint Extension support (new-feat) (in master)

• Feature masking MSR support (enhancement) (in master)

• Support BRCM TruManage chip (Serial over LAN support) (new-feat) (in master)

• fix vmce_amd* functions, unify mce_amd mcheck initialization (fixes/cleanups) - Aravind and Suravee

• NUMA memory scrubbing (done) - Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk#

• ioreq-server, aka secondary emulators (done) - Paul Durrant

• ARM - IOMMU support (done) - Julien Grall

• Netback multiqueue (done) - Wei Liu

• ARM Interrupt latency reduction (no maintenance interrupts) (done) - Stefano Stabellini

Almost Completed Items (as per June)

• ARM - Device assigment on ARM (good) - Julien Grall

• ARM XEN_DOMCTL_memory_mapping hypercall for ARM (good) - Arianna Avanzini

• ARM PSCI v0.2 (good) - Parth Dixit

• ARM GICv3 support (good) - Vijay Kilari

• VPMU - 'perf' support in Xen (good) - Boris Ostrovsky

• Soft affinity for vcpus (was NUMA affinity for vcpus) (good) - Dario Faggioli

• Stability fix (good) - Jan Beulich

• Linux pvops of Xen EFI hypercall support (good) - Daniel Kiper

• OSSTest: libvirt (good) - Ian Campbell

The Process

Tracked items via Xen x.y Development Update mails on xen-devel

If you are working on an item, please respond to the latest Xen 4.5 Development Update on xen-devel. Work-items are tracked in the following format

* <Short description of work item> (<prognosis>)
  <optional: detailed description or comment>
  -  <Name of developer working on the item>

The prognosis is now the likelihood of completion in the 4.5 time frame.

• none - nothing yet
• fair - still working on it, patches are prototypes or RFC
• ok - patches posted, acting on review
• good - some last minute pieces
• done - all done, might have bugs

For example:

* VMware backdoor (hypercall) (ok)
  Needs to be split up and redone
  -  Don Slutz

Other Information about how we manage releases

• General Process
• How the Hypervisor team manages releases
• Release management: Risk, intuition, and freeze exceptions