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: 24th September 2014
• First RC: 24th 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.

Please see the [Xen 4.5 RC1 testing instructions]

Running Roadmap Updates on xen-devel

See

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

Hypervisor

• ARM - introduce GNTTABOP_cache_flush ( Stefano Stabellini)

• ARM - VGIC emulation ( Stefano Stabellini)

• ARM implement mem_access ( Tamas K Lengyel)

• ARM - Add Odroid-XU (Exynos5410) support ( Suriyan Ramasami)

• ARM GICv3 support ( Vijay Kilari)

• ARM implement mem_access ( Tamas K Lengyel)

• ARM - MiniOS ( Thomas Leonard)

• ARM XEN_DOMCTL_memory_mapping hypercall for ARM ( Arianna Avanzini)

• ARM - XENFEAT_grant_map_11 (aka map grants refs at pfn = mfn) ( Stefano Stabellini)

• ARM PSCI v0.2 ( Parth Dixit)

• ARM - IOMMU support ( Julien Grall)

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

• ARM DRA7 support ( Andrii Tseglytskyi)

• ARM: Use super pages in p2m ( Ian Campbell)

• ARM Xen UEFI booting on ARM ( Roy Franz)

• Cache QoS Monitoring - hypercalls ( Chao Peng, Dongxiao Xu, and Shantong Kang)

• XenRT (Preemptive Global Earliest Deadline First) ( Meng Xu)

• Introspection of HVM guests ( Razvan Cojocaru)

• alternative_asm in Xen ( Feng Wu)

• SMAP ( Feng Wu)

• Re-write of vHPET ( Don Slutz)

• vAPIC in PVHVM guests (Xen side) ( Boris Ostrovsky)

• Xen PVH dom0 ( Mukesh Rathor)

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

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

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

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

• AMD fix vmce_amd* functions, unify mce_amd mcheck initialization (fixes/cleanups)

• multiple AMD container files appended together in initrd (early initramfs) ( Aravind and Suravee)

• NUMA memory scrubbing ( Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk)

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

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

• HT enabled, virtualization overhead was reported high (Xen 4.4) ( Dario Faggioli)

lib{xc,xl} and toolstack

• Build systems fixes/improvements ( Andrew Cooper)

• libxl work - JSON to keep track of guest configs ( Wei Liu)

• Remus in Xen (libxl) ( Yang Hongyang)

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

• OSSTest: upstream QEMU ( Ian Campbell)

• rework VM Generation ID ( David Vrabel)

• systemd support ( Luis R. Rodriguez)

• Soft affinity for vcpus libxl/xl changes ( Dario Faggioli)

QEMU

• Bigger PCI hole in QEMU ( Don Slutz)

• QEMU 2.0 branch for qemu-upstream ( Stefano Stabellini)

Linux 3.18 and earlier

• pvSCSI in Linux (fronted and backend) ( Juergen Gross)

• Linux PVH dom0 ( Mukesh Rathor)

• Netback multiqueue ( Wei Liu)

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

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