Re: Fwd: Call for Foundation-supported Project Ideas

From: Elena Mihailescu <elenamihailescu22_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2021 10:55:38 UTC
Hello, all,

Thank you, Matthew, for your description.

As Matthew said, any feedback or any help in bringing these things
upstream is highly appreciated. I want to add links to repo, wiki and
reviews for a better view of our projects.

In UPB (University Politehnica of Bucharest), we work on various bhyve
related projects (some of them are research projects, other are
faculty projects). For better awareness, here is our wiki page [1]
where we present the ongoing projects, reviews, tutorials or other
resources for them.

We have a GitHub [2] organisation where you can find our main tracks:
- improvements to FreeBSD (mainly bhyve) - a forked repository from
FreeBSD/freebsd-src. Usually, each project has a branch where we
develop things and the main branch is used only for synchronisation
with the FreeBSD/freebsd-src main repository.
- improvements to libvdsk - a standalone library that brings support
for different types of file formats that may be used for bhyve (raw,
qcow2, vmdk).

We have pending reviews on Phabricator for which we need feedback:
- bhyve - ARMv8 implementation - https://reviews.freebsd.org/D26976
- bhyve - Snapshot Save and Restore - multiple devices
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D26387
- Warm Migration feature for bhyve - https://reviews.freebsd.org/D28270
- bhyve - JSON format snapshot - https://reviews.freebsd.org/D29262
- bhyve - Capsicum integration - https://reviews.freebsd.org/D30471
- Live migration for bhyve - https://reviews.freebsd.org/D30954

Beside the opened reviews, we are working on various projects (are
described in the wiki as well) that are still not ready for a review
on Phabricator yet:
- checkpoint option for bhyve either using ZFS or libvdsk - we have a
PoC for ZFS [2][3] and are working for adding QCOW2 checkpoint
functionality to libvdsk and then link it to the bhyve checkpoint
functionality.
- USB-passthrough - we managed to pass-through a keyboard to a bhyve
Linux VM, we are working on reattaching the USB device to the host
when exiting the VM and then we plan to check the functionality with
an USB stick (storage transfer).
- AMD CPU support for the save restore - we are running the final
tests before opening a ticket on Phabricator.
- use FreeBSD as a compute node in OpenStack

If you have any questions, please let us know.

[1] https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB/freebsd-src/wiki
[2] https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWyk1y460Dg
[4] https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB/freebsd-src/wiki/Checkpoint-for-bhyve-using-zfs-snapshots-and-clones

Thank you,
Elena Mihailescu

On Fri, 10 Dec 2021 at 01:01, Matthew Grooms <mgrooms@shrew.net> wrote:
>
> Support for USB Device pass through is being worked on by a student at
> the Bucharest Polytechnic University. This effort is essentially a port
> of the feature from Intel's Acorn hypervisor which is based on bhyve ...
>
> https://github.com/FreeBSD-UPB/freebsd-src/tree/projects/bhyve_usb_passthrough
>
> The UPB team has quite a few projects that would benefit from more
> support from the FreeBSD Foundation. They've asked for feedback and
> review of many bhyve related features that have been developed over the
> past few years. Unfortunately most of that work has been gathering dust
> in their github repository. This includes work on features such as warm
> migration, live migration, improved checkpoint file support, improved
> multiple checkpoint of devices, more sophisticated disk file formats
> such as qcow2 and vmdk via libvdsk that could help checkpoint disk
> images, etc.
>
> It would be incredibly helpful if the Foundation could offer some help
> getting some of this code reviewed and provide feedback so that it has a
> chance of being committed at some point in the future.
>
> -Matthew
>
> On 11/30/2021 1:30 PM, Michael wrote:
> >
> >
> > -------- Original Message --------
> > From: Michael <mike@reifenberger.com>
> > Sent: November 30, 2021 11:03:13 AM GMT+01:00
> > To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
> > Subject: Call for Foundation-supported Project Ideas
> >
> > Hi,
> > one missing feature is USB device pass through for bhyve.
> > That would be quite handy for passing unsupported USB devices
> > to Linux/Windows on Laptops where a controller pass through isnt
> > possible.
> >
> >
> > -------- Original Message --------
> > From: tux2bsd via freebsd-hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
> > Sent: November 30, 2021 8:35:36 AM GMT+01:00
> > To: "freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org" <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
> > Subject: Call for Foundation-supported Project Ideas
> >
> > Hi Joe
> >
> > Call for Foundation-supported Project Idea, well not a project but an item of importance in my opinion (the hostile forums disagree with me).
> >
> > Some help to fix freebsd-update , a very longstanding poor performance problem I took the time to investigate and provide an attempt to fix,
> > https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=258863
> >
> > I've been working with Colin Percival towards providing/fine-tuning a workaround but the program itself is monolithic and very intertwined which means a seemingly trivial fix is actually a nightmare - the goal posts keep changing with each step forward. Quite frustrating actually so I'd appreciate some help if mini-projects are acceptable.
> >
> > Thanks
> > tux2bsd
> > (apologies for the thread busting email)
> > --
> > --
>