Introduction

QEMU is considering participating in Outreachy 2016 December-March. This page contains our ideas list and information for mentors.

Find Us

IRC: #qemu-outreachy on irc.oftc.net

For general questions about QEMU in Outreachy, please contact the following people:

Stefan Hajnoczi (stefanha on IRC)

Project Ideas

This is the listing of suggested project ideas.

QEMU projects

Event loop profiling tool

Summary: Develop a top(1)-like tool to monitor event loop dispatching

A running QEMU process can have a number of different types of threads. An I/O thread (either the main thread, or a custom iothread for dataplane devices) is a thread that runs an poll based event loop.

The event loop dispatches I/O events that come from user interface (e.g. monitor fd), guest OS (e.g. ioeventfd), or program's internal sources (e.g. bottom halves or timers). Their occupation of host CPU time is often very useful debug/diagnostic information. Ideally the profiling code in QEMU would be in a dedicated thread so it is still usable even when the event loops are stuck.

In this project you will develop a tool for QEMU that is like the top(1) utility for Linux, to monitor QEMU's event loops. As a prerequisite, you need to modify QEMU to expose necessary data that will be collected by the new tool to generate the profiling output.

You must be familiar with (n)curses library and multi-threaded programming. You can write the tool in either C or Python.

Links:

Details:

Skill level: advanced
Language: C, (optional) Python
Mentor: Fam Zheng <famz@redhat.com> (fam on IRC), Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com> (stefanha on IRC)

Information for mentors

Mentors are responsible for keeping in touch with their candidate and assessing the candidate's progress.

The mentor typically gives advice, reviews the candidate's code, and has regular communication with the candidate to ensure progress is being made.

Being a mentor is a significant time commitment, plan for 5 hours per week. Make sure you can make this commitment because backing out during the summer will affect the candidate's experience.

The mentor chooses their candidate by reviewing candidate application forms, giving out bite-sized tasks so applicants can submit a patch upstream, and conducting IRC interviews with candidates. Depending on the number of candidates, this can be time-consuming in itself. Choosing the right candidate is critical so that both the mentor and the candidate can have a successful experience.