Re: [Xen-devel] QEMU upstreaming: status and todo

[Łukasz Oleś <lukaszoles@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 05 January 2011 18:03:15 Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> Hi all,
> I would like to spent few words to let people know the current status of
> the Qemu upstreaming work and what is still missing.
> 
> Anthony Perard sent the 8th version of his "Xen device model support"
> patch series to qemu-devel and he has already received an ack from
> Alexander Graf. We are currently waiting for another review by Anthony
> Liguori but we are positive the series is close to be accepted in its
> current form.
> 
> Once the series is upstream we can start using upstream Qemu to do Xen
> development, however before we can actually use it as default device
> model we need to fill some gaps.
> In fact some things are still missing compared to qemu-xen, the
> followings in particular:
> 
> - VGA dirty bits optimization
> This is a performance optimization for the emulated VGA card, Anthony
> Perard is already working on it.
> 
> - switch to SeaBios
> Qemu uses SeaBios, that has several advantages on RomBios, one of them
> is that SeaBios is actually maintained.
> It makes sense to switch from the old Qemu and the old bios to a new
> Qemu and a new bios at the same time in order to reduce the
> compatibility pains to users.
> 
> - stubdom support
> The "Xen device model support" patch series lacks stubdom support.
> This is mainly a matter of compiling upstream Qemu against MiniOS,
> the problem is that MiniOS is not exactly posix compliant so we'll need
> to make some changes.
> 
> - pci passthrough
> The patch series also lacks pci passthrough support.
> The current pci passthrough code in qemu-xen is rather large and doesn't
> integrate very well with the rest of Qemu so it is non-trivial to
> upstream.
> 
> - QMP support in libxl
> upstream Qemu supports an RPC protocol called QMP that is JSON based.
> We need to be able to use it to issue commands to Qemu, replacing the
> current mechanism based on xenstore. For example this would be needed by
> pci passthrough to send the "plug" and "unplug" commands to Qemu.
> 
> 
> Ideally we'll be able to complete these tasks by the end of the Xen 4.2
> release cycle so that we can have the new Qemu as default device model
> by then.

Great job, it sounds really interesting. 

Is it usable in current state? Can I test it on current xen 4.0.x?

Can You write what are the coolest things in upstream qemu?

Regards,

--
Łukasz Oleś

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