Hi Everyone,
As we finish our summer holidays (at least in the northern hemisphere) and peoples availability returns to normal it is time to consider what next steps we should be taking for project Stratos.
As a brief reminder over the last year we have been involved:
- up-streaming VirtIO specifications - reviewing and implementing kernel drivers - written a number of vhost-user daemons - enabled more QEMU VirtIO stubs - developed the rust based Xen Vhost Master
While there is plenty of ongoing maintainer work to do in the various projects we need to consider what projects to look at next. As a reminder in our original project goals we listed 4 areas of interest:
- High-performance Virtio interfaces - Virtual Machine Monitors with a safety island - Boot Orchestration - Written Standards for the hypercalls
So far we have been mostly focused on VirtIO itself. Is there still interest in pursuing the other parts? The safety island work could for example involve extending our rust-vmm work to write a VMM monitor for restarting VMs on a statically configured system. Boot Orchestration may be something to defer or feed into to other projects such as SOAFEE which has plans for both system orchestration and cloud native support for testing these workloads.
I think we should at least review the project description at:
https://linaro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/STR/overview
and ensure it is updated to reflect the current goals and aspirations of the project.
As to more concrete potential work areas:
- Expand rust-vmm to support Xen in vmm-reference? - Test rust-vmm and its devices with pKVM? - Investigate bare metal VirtIO backends with Rust? - Push forward up-streaming more VirtIO devices? - where does inter-VM comms fit in here?
And of course as this is an open collaborative project we encourage people to join in the effort. This is not meant to be merely a way of watching Linaro engineers work ;-)
As finding time slots that the majority of people can attend is a pain I propose the following poll to select our new time, those who aren't interested in attending need not vote:
https://doodle.com/meeting/participate/id/aKZB8Qne
I've also decided to close our regular Stratos Rust sync in favour of attending the upstream rust-vmm call which we participate in anyway.
Looking forward to next week,