Archived/Hackathon/May2014

When and Where ?

Rackspace Ltd, May 29-30

We confirmed the Xen Project Hackathon for May 29-30, 2014 in London, UK at Rackspaces London Site.

We will start at 9AM and finish at 5PM each day. There will also be an evening social event on May 29th : more details will follow.

Address:

Rackspace Ltd

5 Millington Road

Hyde Park Hayes

Middlesex

UB3 4AZ

Check out the event location on the map

• Pictures of the venue and past events
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Hotel Options

StayCity Serviced Apartments (~5 minutes from venue)

StayCity Serviced Apartments
Highpoint Village, Station Approach, Hayes UB3 4FN
Closest Train Station: Directly next to Hayes and Harlington Station (National Rail and District/Central tube line). 15/20 minutes to Paddington station on the Overground line and 15 minutes on the fast train to Paddington or 30 minutes on the slow train.
Distance from Venue: 4 minute walk to Rackspace office.
Nightly Rate is £68-£90, not central
Directions

Hotel Xanadu (~23 minutes from venue)

Hotel Xanadu
26-42 Bond St, London W5 5AA
Closest Train Station: Ealing Broadway (National Rail and District/Central tube line)
Distance from Venue: Around 23 minutes to Venue and 15 minutes to Paddington station on the Overground line.
Nightly Rate is £130-£220
Directions

Hilton Paddington (~26 minutes from venue)

Hilton Paddington
Hilton London Paddington Hotel, 146 Praed St, London W2 1EE
Closest Train Station: Inside London Paddington Station (National Rail and multiple underground stations)
Distance from Venue: Approx 30 minutes to Hayes and Harlington
Nightly Rate is £180-£260
Directions

Hotel Indigo Paddington (~27 minutes from venue)

Hotel Indigo London Paddington
16 London Street, Paddington, London W2 1HL
Closest Train Station: Inside London Paddington Station (National Rail and multiple underground stations)
Distance from Venue: Approx 30 minutes to Hayes and Harlington
Nightly Rate is £200-£280
Directions

Mercure London Paddington Hotel (~26 minutes from venue)

Mercure London Paddington Hotel
144 Praed St, Paddington, London, W2 1HU
Closest Train Station: Inside London Paddington Station (National Rail and multiple underground stations)
Distance from Venue: Approx 30 minutes to Hayes and Harlington
Nightly Rate is £130-£200
Directions

Other Paddington Options

Note that there are many hotels within walking distance of London Paddington at different price points

Transport Information

Getting from London Heathrow to Paddington and/or Ealing (Hotel Xanadu)

• Heathrow Express will get you from LHR to Paddington in 15 minutes (runs every 15 minutes)
• Heathrow Connect will get you to Ealing Broadway (Hotel Xanadu) in 10 minutes (runs every 30 minutes)

Getting from London Paddington to Hayes and Harlington Station

To get from London Paddington to Hayes and Harlington Station you have two fast options via London Overground

• Trains going to Oxford or Reading will stop in Hayes & Harlington. The train fare is £5.90 and takes 17 or 19 minutes
• Heathrow Connect takes 20 minute and leaves at 03 and 33 past each hour
• There are approximately 7 trains leaving every hour

To go back, take any train to London Paddington

Walking from Hayes and Harlington Station to the Rackspace Office

Click on Image for more information.

Visa Invitation Letters

If you require an invitation, please send an e-mail to community dot manager at xenproject dot org

Topics to Discuss, Code, Work on, ... at the Hackathon

Topics

Please add topics you want to discuss in this section

Various process/infrastructure issues: xen-devel list traffic, devel IRC channel, personal repos, maintainerships Date of insert: 2014-02-27; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: N/A Technical contact: Lars Kurth Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@ IRC channel for project: #xen-devel Difficulty: N/A Skills Needed: N/A Description: I think we have a few issues: Traffic on xen-devel has doubled in the last 2 years and is getting hard to handle. I would like to discuss different options and then make a proposal to the community Reviews: seems we have a bottleneck of review capability in some areas - how to resolve? We need a more open approach to devel IRC We had a few requests for hosting team branches and personal repos : we need a document outlining when we would give someone a repo and how to request one Maintainership : I believe there is a mismatch between our governance and what maintainers/committers expect. Maybe we can clarify Outcomes: Draft proposal on developer lists, more open devel IRC and personal and team/integration repos

VirtIO and Xen Date of insert: 2014-18-03; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: N/A Technical contact: Daniel Kiper Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@ IRC channel for project: #xen-devel Difficulty: N/A Skills Needed: N/A Description: Discuss the technical issues related to make VirtIO work on Xen. Outcomes: Use information for the VIRTIO-46

Merging PVH into HVM Date of insert: 2014-03-27; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: Unknown Technical contact: Tim Deegan Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@ IRC channel for project: #xen-devel Difficulty: Moderate Skills Needed: Hypervisor internals Description: I would like to make 'PVH' a special case of 'HVM' inside the hypervisor rather than a third VM type, removing some special cases and simplifying code. Much of that will be mechanical but there are some open questions around IO handling, CPUID etc. Outcomes: A plan, and hopefully some code!

Incubation project proposals Date of insert: 2014-03-28; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: N/A Technical contact: Lars Kurth Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@ IRC channel for project: #xen-devel Difficulty: N/A Skills Needed: N/A Description: Two incubation project proposals are currently being worked on. I am still waiting for drafts: One for Windows PV drivers One for automotive / android (where the bulk may be userspace driver front-ends) and possibly some code/drivers specific to a few proprietary guest OS'es As we are all there, it makes sense to review, propose changes and if we feel the proposals are good, to vote on them Outcomes: Review (and vote on proposals), if they are ready in time

Libvirt and Xen integration / co-operation Date of insert: 2014-04-08; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: N/A Technical contact: David Scott, Daniel Berrange Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@ IRC channel for project: #xen-devel Difficulty: N/A Skills Needed: N/A Description: We would like to sync-up with other community members on libvirt + xen and to help make the default experience on Linux distributions better. References, see cloudstack-dev : Support pure Xen as a hypervisor follow-up Outcomes: Investigate designs, patches, approaches to improve Xen integration in Libvirt

QEMU and SeaBIOS regression testing Date of insert: 2014-04-08; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: N/A Technical contact: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@ IRC channel for project: #xen-devel Difficulty: N/A Skills Needed: N/A Description: I think we have a few issues: We don't test or track how QEMU/SeaBIOS upstream works with Xen. We need a way to track so if somebody in the QEMU/SeaBIOS upstream breaks we can immediately notify them. We need a plan. Outcomes: Plan and roadmap

KVP (Key value pair) in Linux with Xen Date of insert: 2014-04-08; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: N/A Technical contact: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@ IRC channel for project: #xen-devel Difficulty: N/A Skills Needed: N/A Description: Microsoft drivers have a mechanism for host (and guest) to communicate IP addresses, and a family of keys and values that can be exported in user-space. The user-space daemon (that every distro has nowadays) can act on them (see in the Linux kernel tools/hv/hv_kvp_daemon.c). There are out-of-source tools that do something similar (or better) in different products, but if we can piggyback on what is there and expand to automatically work under Xen the better. Outcomes: Plan

NFV on Xen Date of insert: 2014-04-10; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: n/a Technical contact: Joao Martins Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@ IRC channel for project: #xen-devel Difficulty: N/A Skills Needed: N/A Description: A discussion on open issues regarding using Xen as an efficient NFV platform: fast packet I/O, network backend and our recent optimizations as part of developing ClickOS. We would further like to discuss how to go about mainstreaming our changes. Outcomes: Discussion, Plan Peer Review Comments *  Jbeulich 07:12, 7 May 2014 (UTC) What is NFV? Please don't use acronyms unexplained unless it is clear that everybody knows them.  Lars.kurth 09:10, 7 May 2014 (UTC) NFV stands for Network Functions Virtualization

Xen 4.5 roadmap Date of insert: 2014-04-21; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: N/A Technical contact: Everybody Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@ IRC channel for project: #xen-devel Difficulty: N/A Skills Needed: N/A Description: Figure out what we want in Xen 4.5. Outcomes: Roadmap

Using Docker to deploy driver domains, service VMs, Mirage OS VMs, and friends - Can it be done? Date of insert: 2014-04-23; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: N/A Technical contact: Raised by Lars, but does not have the technical depth to really lead it (happy to take notes though) Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@ IRC channel for project: #xen-devel Difficulty: N/A Skills Needed: N/A Description: Docker is making a lot of waves in open source communities. There are really two functional aspects to Docker: Linux Containers as lightweight hypervisor (with all the security drawbacks) Application Containers as a packaging and deployment format - this part is really exciting as it is a gamechanger in application design, system deployment, and, critically, versioning. Slides 1-15 of [1] make this case quite compellingly. What is not clear is how tightly the two are coupled and interdependent. I heard (but can't find references) that there are, or it is possible to write Docker Engines for other hypervisors. At least in theory. Now, if you look at slide 16, you notice that the architecture diagram is very similar to a Xen based system with service domains, driver domains, and the likes of Mirage OS, OSv, ErlangOnXen (also see Voxoz which seem to be working on something similar), ... BUT: of course we have the added benefits of isolation and thus more security and the flexibility of running traditional fully fledged VMs with different Guest OS’es on the same host. At least in theory, this should make it possible to use the deployment capabilities of Docker to deploy service domains, Mirage OS & friends. If this was possible and could be implemented easily we could be in for a winner. Aka getting all the benefits for the deployment part of Docker, while not suffering any of the drawbacks. And we could piggyback onto the Docker hype. Of course I don’t know whether this is technically feasible at all and how hard it would be to do this. Maybe relevant References: Voxoz = ErlangOnXen + Docker and [2] Run Docker on any OS in a headless hypervisor (probably not exactly the right use-case) boot2docker Outcomes: Is it feasible to do this? Would anyone be interested? Are there next steps?

Dealing with XSA-77 fallout Date of insert: 2014-05-07; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: N/A Technical contact: Jan Beulich Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@ IRC channel for project: #xen-devel Difficulty: Moderate Skills Needed: hypervisor internals Description: While the security aspect of these issues got waived by the XSA, these still represent problems even outside of disaggregation. Outcomes: Determine set of people willing (and having time) to help.

Further memory scalability Date of insert: 2014-05-09; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: N/A Technical contact: Jan Beulich Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@ IRC channel for project: #xen-devel Difficulty: Advanced Skills Needed: hypervisor memory management internals Description: Having reached support for 16Tb, vendors are in the process of delivering even bigger systems. Outcomes: Determine which possible routes are viable to explore in more depth.

HVM guest ballooning vs PoD Date of insert: 2014-05-07; Verified: Not updated in 2020; GSoC: N/A Technical contact: Jan Beulich Mailing list/forum for project: xen-devel@ IRC channel for project: #xen-devel Difficulty: Intermediate Skills Needed: ballooning and PoD understanding Description: How to determine the precise amount a HVM guest needs to balloon down. Outcomes: An answer to above question, irrespective of whether verbal or in form of code.

I want to attend

Request an Invitation

Request Invite

As spaces at the Xen Project Hackathon are limited, we are asking attendees to request an invitation. If you did, you will be notified by email within 5 business days with instructions on how to confirm your invitation.

As last year, we will be asking for a small registration fee of $15. This fee will be given to a charity or open source organisation. You will need to cover your own travel, accommodation and other costs such as evening meals, etc. We do have limited travel stipends available for individuals who cannot afford to travel: please contact community dot manager at xen dot org if you need to make use of it.

I have an Invitation

We will email you instructions on how to confirm your invitation request.

Confirmed attendees

Note that we only have a maximum of 40 spaces:

1. Lars Kurth, Citrix
2. Olivier Lambert, Vates
3. Julien Fontanet, Vates
4. Ian Campbell, Citrix
5. Daniel Berrange, Red Hat
6. Daniel Kiper, Oracle
7. Donald Slutz, Verizon Communications
8. Stefano Stabellini, Citrix
9. Tim Deegan, Xen Project
10. Michail Flouris, OnApp
11. Michail Alvanos, OnApp
12. Xenia Ragiadakou, OnApp
13. Joao Martins, NEC Europe Ltd
14. Donald Koch, Verizon Communications
15. Dario Faggioli, Citrix
16. Anthony PERARD, Citrix
17. George Dunlap, Citrix
18. Ian Jackson, Citrix
19. Filipe Manco, NEC Europe Ltd
20. Roger Pau Monné, Citrix
21. John Garbutt, Rackspace
22. Boris Ostrovsky, Oracle
23. Thomas Leonard, University of Cambridge
24. Anil Madhavapeddy, University of Cambridge
25. Dave Scott, Citrix
26. Jonathan Ludlam, Citrix
27. Konrad Wilk, Oracle
28. Wei Liu, Citrix
29. Alexander Cibby, Allegis Group
30. Julien Grall, Linaro
31. David Vrabel, Citrix
32. Andrew Cooper, Citrix
33. Jan Beulich, Suse
34. Srinivas Kalaga, Samsung

Provisionally Confirmed attendees

These are people who want to come, but waiting for visas or other confirmation

1. Andrii Tseglytskyi, GlobalLogic
2. Karanbir Singh, RedHat
3. 2-3 Rackspace staff members
4. 1 ARM staff member

Waiting Listed people

1. Malcolm Crossley, Citrix
2. Zoltan Kiss, Citrix
3. Euan Harris, Citrix