[Xen-ia64-devel] Next phase of Xen/ia64 development...

["Magenheimer, Dan (HP Labs Fort Collins)" <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxx>]

There have been a number of solid contributions by many people
to get Xen/ia64 to where it is today.  You should all be very proud!

I believe the next phase of Xen/ia64 development will need
to be focused on the end user of Xen/ia64.  What can we do
to put a useful Xen/ia64 into the hands of Itanium system
owners who want the functionality of Xen, but who are not
interested in development or tracking the latest upstream
changes?

The top areas of development might be:

1) Stable domU.  As some have noticed, domU is currently capable
   of getting to a single-user shell prompt and executing simple
   commands but, if it is exercised much, various programs crash
   possibly killing the guest, and in some cases even killing dom0.
   This is unacceptable for a "normal user".  There are probably
   a few bugs in the virtual drivers and hypervisor, but these
   may be difficult to track down.  We developers need to work
   together to identify reproducible test cases to help isolate
   and fix them.
2) Networking.  A system without networking has little value to
   a real user.  Most of the netback/netfront code should be fully
   leveragable.  We need only identify the few changes necessary
   to adapt to ia64 differences.  The patch I posted earlier
   this week should help us to move in the right direction.
3) A good regression test environment.  Many of the bugs we
   are fixing are subtle corner cases which occur very rarely.
   When fixing these, it is very possible that another bug
   will be introduced that only occurs in another subtle
   corner case.  We need to ensure that we continue forward
   progress.

Once domU is usable to run real applications and networking is
working and stable, I think the next steps are:

4) SMP guest support
5) Migration support
6) Performance tuning

but these will be difficult (and ultimately futile) to work on
without the stability and networking.

Comments?

Dan

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