Google Summer of Code 2012

Introduction

As we did last year, QEMU is going to apply as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2012. 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 in GSoC, please contact the following people.

• Stefan Hajnoczi
• Luiz Capitulino
• Anthony Liguori

Find Us

• IRC (devel): #qemu on irc.oftc.net
• IRC (GSoC specific): #qemu-gsoc on irc.oftc.net
• Mailing list: http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel

GSoC important pages

• FAQ
• Program Timeline
• Melange User Guide
• Advice for Mentors

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

Please get in touch before applying so we can arrange for an IRC interview and get to know each other. Students who do not contact the mentor cannot be accepted.

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.

== TITLE ==
 
 '''Summary:''' Short description of the project
 
 Detailed description of the project.
 
 '''Links:'''
 * Wiki links to relevant material
 * External links to mailing lists or web sites
 
 '''Details:'''
 * Component: QEMU or KVM or libvirt
 * Skill level: beginner or intermediate or advanced
 * Language: C
 * Mentor: Email address and IRC nick
 * Suggested by: Person who suggested the idea

git style front-end to QEMU

Summary: Provide a git like front-end for QEMU that allows for enumerating running instances and manipulating them from a command line.

Starting in the 1.0 release, we freed up the qemu executable name in order to allow a script to be introduced that would provide an easier to use scripting interface to QEMU. It would provide a series of sub commands like list, create, shutdown, etc. that would provide an alternative command line front-end to QEMU that the qemu-system executables.

Links:

• git user manual

Details:

• Component: QEMU
• Skill level: beginner
• Language: Python
• Mentor: Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com> (IRC: aliguori)
• Suggested by: Anthony Liguori

Finish OS X Virtualization Support

Summary: Finish up the last remaining pieces to enable running Mac OS X guests on Linux on Mac hardware

There are a few remaining pieces of work to allow virtualizing OS X guests in KVM. A few devices still need to be up-streamed. Testing needs to be done, and likely some new code will have to be written to fix certain bugs. The last time anyone was successful in running OS X in KVM was OS X 10.4. Support for newer versions would be required. The most recently updated patches that I know of would be in the OpenSUSE src rpm for the kvm package.

Links:

• most recent howto

Details:

• Component: QEMU/KVM
• Skill level: intermediate/advanced
• Language: C
• Mentor: iggy, Alexander Graf
• Suggested by: iggy

In-process NBD server

Summary: Integrate qemu-nbd server functionality into qemu so disk images can be accessed remotely while the VM is running

The qemu-nbd utility is a stand-alone Network Block Device server which exports disk images (qcow2, qed, vmdk, etc). Linux has an NBD driver, this makes it possible to attach NBD devices like iSCSI or ATA-over-Ethernet volumes and operate on them like local block devices using mkfs, mount, and other common tools.

It is not safe to run qemu-nbd while the VM is running because the disk image could be corrupted by simultaneous updates or read access could give inconsistent results. The goal of this project is to make the qemu-nbd functionality available for a running VM by integrating it into qemu proper.

New QEMU monitor commands must be added to allow disk images to be exported from inside qemu while the VM is running. For safety the in-process NBD server would only allow read access. It should be possible to export not just top-level image files but also backing files.

This new feature will enable online backup, data migration, and other interesting scenarios.

Links:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_block_device
• http://blog.vmsplice.net/2011/02/how-to-access-virtual-machine-image.html

Details:

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

Partial device emulation in KVM

Summary: Add support for and benchmark partial device emulation in KVM

When using KVM, almost all device emulation is done in user space (QEMU). While this is really nice from an architecture point of view, it's not the greatest thing when it comes to latencies. Some devices like IDE, VGA, HPET have very hot path registers that can be easily emulated in the kernel (KVM), with all heavier operations going to user space.

This project is about prototyping such partial device emulation to see if it actually does give us speedups. If you manage to show great performance improvements with it, we would then work on finding clean solutions to integrate this upstream and also push it upstream.

Mid-term goal: Implement prototype for one of the 3 mentioned devices, do benchmarks Final goal: If the prototype was successful, work on upstreaming it, if not, pick another device and implement a prototype for that

With a bit of luck, we might end up getting significant speedups to KVM!

Links:

• IDE specs
• HPET spec
• VGA spec

Details:

• Component: QEMU, KVM
• Skill level: intermediate/advanced
• Language: C
• Mentor: Alexander Graf
• Suggested by: Alexander Graf