Google Summer of Code 2010

From QEMU

Introduction

QEMU is going to apply for the Google Summer of Code 2010 as a mentoring organization, this page has all the information that students, mentors and other interested people should be interested about it.

Information for students

TODO: Describe what we expect from applications

Find Us

Projects Ideas

Convert Monitor commands to the QObject API

In order to support different types of output (eg. user Monitor and a machine protocol), we have introduced a object layer to QEMU. Every monitor command should be converted to use the API provided by that layer (called the QObject API), currently we have several commands still to be converted.

Add AHCI emulation to QEMU

Newer Windows versions run in Qemu only with IDE emulation which is very slow. Writing virtio drivers is also difficult because drivers for those Windows versions needs to be signed. An alternative is to implement a device emulation which fits better to virtualization needs. AHCI has one of those device interfaces and is currently not emulated by Qemu. Goal of this project is to implement an AHCI emulation for Qemu.

Add Macintosh to 68k system emulation

In order to support Macintosh system emulation, almost every device must be implemented on QEMU (SCSI, CUDA, ADB, Apple framebuffers). How they work can be investigated in Inside Macintosh documents and other emulators (MESS, BasiliskII, vMac).

Mac guest machine support (x86)

In order to boot Mac OS X for Intel architectures an ICH-7 chipset needs to be emulated. The biggest missing part is SATA emulation (AHCI).

Mac-on-Linux guest machine support (ppc)

The Mac-on-Linux project has a working paravirtual device collection, firmware and bootloader to make Mac OS X work inside Mac-on-Linux. With this device set ported to Qemu, we could obsolete the Mac-on-Linux project as is and use TCG and KVM as backends.

G3/G4 KVM host support

I'm not sure this is the right place to put this. If not, please mark it as invalid.

KVM for PowerPC supports G5 hosts today. To fully deprecate the Mac-on-Linux kernel module, we'd need to get PPC32 host support too.

Boot Mac OS >= 8.5 on PowerPC system emulation

Most of Power Macintosh hardware is emulated, things need only to be cleaned and OpenBIOS enhanced to support loading Macintosh Toolbox from the "Mac OS ROM" file present in any Mac OS >= 8.5 system.

Add a more common VGA, like the S3 Trio

More guests have native drivers for that card than for Cirrus GD5446.

  • Skill level: medium
  • Languages: C, x86 assembler
  • Mentor:
  • Suggested by: Natalia Portillo

Enhance, update and integrate Acorn Archimedes system emulation

ARM system emulation should include Acorn Archimedes system emulation. Work-In-Progress was done against 0.9.0 tree. Now with Risc OS open sourced things could be easier. Most problems seems to be rarely used opcodes and 26-bit modes.

BeBox system emulation

The BeBox system is just a CHRP compliant dual PowerPC 603 processor machine. Most of the devices are already emulated, only a couple need to be added. Original firmware can be reverse engineered as it is a very simple firmware (not OpenFirmware compliant).

NeXT machines system emulation

NeXT machines are designed in a similar idea to 68k Macintosh ones. Documentation is almost not available. Original firmware MUST be used. MESS emulator project started a NeXT emulation but it is still work-in-progress so not much ideas can be taken from it.

Shared memory transport between guest(s) and host

  • Skill level:
  • Languages:
  • Mentor:
  • Suggested by: Cam Macdonell

Pass through file systems (9p, CIFS)

  • Skill level:
  • Languages:
  • Mentor:
  • Suggested by: Cam Macdonell

Add more sophisticated encodings to VNC server

Write a C QMP library based on QEMU JSON and QMP code

Add support for guest copy/paste

Device state visualization

For debugging guest access to emulated hardware, it can be very useful to obtain the state of those devices. The idea is to make use of QEMU's infrastructure to freeze devices for snapshots/migrations, but write that snapshots in a human-readable form to the monitor interface. Besides plain dumping of known variables, there should also be a way to add pretty-printing for key information of individual devices, like translated flag bits, visualized queue content, etc.

  • Skill level: medium
  • Languages: C
  • Mentor: Jan Kiszka
  • Suggested by: Jan Kiszka

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
  • Suggested by: Jan Kiszka

Completing big real mode emulation

  • Skill level: high
  • Languages: C, x86 assembly
  • Mentor: Avi Kivity
  • Suggested by: Avi Kivity

Mentors Assistants

  • Brian Jackson
    • IRC Nick: iggy
    • Areas Of Specialty: Jack of all trades
    • I'm not a hardcore qemu dev, but I know my way around, I know who knows what, my time is probably less valuable than some of the other devs, and I have the available time to do it
  • Natalia Portillo
    • IRC Nick: claunia
    • I'm not a qemu developer but I have the most extensive collection of guests systems for testing, access to a couple of hardware and lots of documentation.
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