Google Summer of Code 2011

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Revision as of 09:02, 28 February 2011 by Jki (talk | contribs)

Introduction

As we did last year, QEMU is going to apply as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2011. This page contains our ideas list and some additional information for students and mentors.

Please note that QEMU, as a GSoC organization, also includes the following projects:

  • The Linux Kernel's KVM module
  • Libvirt, the virtualization library (pending OK from libvirt people)

Organization

Any Question, request or problem regarding QEMU on GSoC 2011, please contact one of the following people.

Find Us

GSoC important pages

Information for students

We require students to provide (at least) the following information in their applications:

  • Contact information (email, irc nick, phone number)
  • A general personal description (skills, past experiences and possible open source contributions)
  • Why QEMU and why this project
  • A detailed description of the approach the student will take

VERY IMPORTANT: Submitting a patch and having it merged by QEMU or KVM increases your chances of being accepted.

Projects Ideas

This is the listing of suggested project ideas. It might be useful to check last year's page. Also note that students are free to suggest their own projects.

QCOW2 <-> QED image converter

Summary: Design and implement an in-place disk image converter that safely and efficiently changes between the QCOW2 and QED image formats.

QEMU supports several disk image formats that make it possible to manage and share virtual machine disk images as files. The well known formats include qcow2 (QEMU) and vmdk (VMware), and the QEMU Enhanced Disk (QED) format has pushed new levels of performance.

In order for users to go between formats, the qemu-img convert command reads a disk image in one format and outputs it in another format. This has two limitations:

  1. Twice the amount of space is required since both the old and the new image are kept around.
  2. Copying data is slow for large images.

The aim is to design a safe in-place converter to change from QCOW2 to QED (and vice versa) without copying image data. This will require understanding the QCOW2 and QED image formats and how they organize image data. You will need to carefully design the process so image data is never at risk in the event of a crash during conversion. Finally, you will be responsible for adding tests that defend this feature to the qemu-iotests suite.

Links:

Please get in touch before applying so we can chat about your ideas and get to know each other.

  • Component: QEMU
  • Skill level: medium
  • Language: C
  • Mentor: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com>, 'stefanha' on IRC
  • Suggested by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com>

Tracepoint support for the gdbstub

Recent gdb versions allow to define ad-hoc tracepoints that are able to record memory content or register states whenever the target code hits them. This is supposed to happen non-intrusively, while the target is executing (almost) as normal. QEMU could serve as a nice backend for gdb when it comes to using such dynamic tracepoints for (guest) kernel debugging. In contrast to approaches like kgtp running inside the guest kernel, QEMU is able to perform this in hypervisor context, at most requiring to insert breakpoints into guest visible memory.

In this project, the QEMU gdbstub shall be extended with support for tracepoints. Architecture specific parts shall at least support x86 guests. Tracepoints shall be usable both in emulation and KVM mode. Extending the KVM kernel services to accelerate tracepoints is not required in this first step. See gdb documentation and specifically the gdb remote protocol for further details.

  • Component: QEMU
  • Skill level: medium..high
  • Language: C
  • Mentor: Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@web.de>
  • Suggested by: Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@web.de>

Adding basic KVM support to MIPS architecture

Summary: This project intends to add kvm virtualizaiton support on MIPS architecture.

KVM supports several main CPU architectures such as x86,power PC, arm. However there is no MIPS support currently. MIPS is a one of the popular architectures in embedded world. So it is really good if we can add kvm support to it.

MIPS architecture does not have hardware virtualization support, the trap-emulation is the easy way for the CPU virtualization. For the memory virtualization, MMU is bypassed by MIPS's kseg0 segment, in which the kernel code residing. We either need to trap every memory access to this segment or remapping the guest linux kernel to other segment.

Since adding new architecture support in KVM is a big task for GSOC, so this project just wants to add *basic* support. The GSOC goal of this project is a working KVM kernel module and KVM user program which can boot the guest linux kernel (without the rootfs).

  • Component: QEMU/KVM
  • Skill level: medium..high
  • Language: C
  • Mentor: Aurelien <aurelien@aurel32.net>
  • Suggested by: yajin <yajin@vm-kernel.org>

Upstreaming EHCI support

There exists a good foundation for EHCI support in out-of-tree repository. But it hasn't been proposed for merge yet due to a few open issues. The list below reflects potential sub-tasks but it's not necessarily up-to-date with latest development:

  • testing and stabilizing host pass-through of various devices
  • periodic frames support
  • isochronous traffic support
  • split transactions support
  • improving NAK/reload support
  • throttle interrupt rate based on OS settings
  • code cleanup

The primary goal of this task is to fix the most annoying issues of the EHCI emulation and prepare the result of upstream merge.

  • Component: QEMU
  • Skill level: medium..high
  • Language: C
  • Mentor: tbd (Gerd, Jan, ...?)
  • Suggested by: Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@web.de>

Improving USB emulation accuracy

There are still a few rough edges in QEMU's USB support beyond the EHCI topic:

  • improve USB device emulation like mass storage devices, network adapters, etc.
  • improved topology configuration by modeling it via qdev
  • new device emulations, e.g. webcam (playing video files) or IO-warrior-like device
  • ...

The task consists of identifying open issues and use cases by testing them against various guest systems, then fixing the deficits, and proposing the result in form of patch series for upstream merge.

  • Component: QEMU
  • Skill level: medium..high
  • Language: C
  • Mentor: tbd (Gerd, Jan, ...?)
  • Suggested by: Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@web.de>

Upstreaming some of the Android emulator bits

The Android Emulator is based on ancient QEMU. To kick off its upstream integration, the existing code shall be analyzed and core elements of the emulated reference platform shall be ported to current QEMU. The goal is to get some Android image booting, bringing it into a usable state so that simple applications can be tested.

  • Skill level: medium..high
  • Languages: C
  • Mentor: Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@web.de>
  • Suggested by: Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@web.de>
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