Xen Project Hackathon 15 Event Report

After spending almost a week in Shanghai for the Xen Project Hackathon it is time to write up some notes.
More than 48 delegates from Alibaba, Citrix, Desay SV Automotive, GlobalLogic, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, Oracle, Suse and Visteon Electronics attended the event, which covered a wide range of topics.
I wanted to thank Susie Li, Hongbo Wang and Mei Yu from Intel for funding and organizing the event.

Format

Xen Project Hackathons started originally as pure hackathons, but have over time evolved to follow the Open Space Unconference format, which we tested in 2012 and fully embraced in 2013. It appears to be one of the best formats to foster discussion and problem solving for groups of up to 50 people.
Besides providing an opportunity to meet face-to-face and build bridges, our hackathons have been very successful in tackling difficult issues, which require plenty of interaction. These issues range from modifying our development process and solving architecture problems to conducting difficult design discussions, coordinating inter-dependencies and sharing experiences. Of course we also write code and sometimes conduct live code reviews in smaller groups alongside the discussion sessions.

Discussed Topics

At the event, we covered topics such as:

• Cadence of maintenance releases
• Numbering of Xen Project Releases
• Xen 4.6 Release Planning
• Testing and Testing Frameworks
• Hot-patching in the Xen Project Hypervisor
• Changes to the COLO architecture and interdependencies with Migration v2
• Possible Future Improvements to Live Migration
• Upstreaming of Intel GVT-g
• Automotive, including lessons learned on implementing graphics virtualization using OpenGL 2.0 and a walk through of a mediated graphics virtualization solution for the Imagination PowerVR SGX544 GPU on Xen and ARM
• Xen and OpenStack
• Evolution of Virtual Machine Introspection (including HW assistance) in the Xen Hypervisor
• Vendor Strategies For Upgrading Xen in their products (e.g. from Xen 4.1.5 to 4.5)
• Effectiveness of New Xen Project Security Policy

As usual, we will post summaries (or patches/RFC’s) from these discussions on xen-devel@ – I will also post links to follow-up discussions on our wiki.

Future Xen Project Developer Events in Asia

We’ve learned that the term hackathon is misleading for this event and confuses some of our attendees. Our hackathons are really more of an Architecture Workshop and Design Summit. For this reason, we will probably rename the Hackathon: for a current proposal on the new name check out this and this e-mail thread.
As the event was very successful and we have a growing, active developer community in China, we are considering holding another similar event in 2017 or a Xen Project Developer Summit at LinuxCon Japan in 2017. Stay tuned for more details.