Google Summer of Code 2014 question

[Neel Natu]

Hi John,

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 2:36 PM, John Matty <jcm104 at pitt.edu> wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> My name is John, and I was interested in doing Google Summer of Code for
> FreeBSD this Summer.  I am currently interested in writing a virtual machine
> execution language.  A rough draft of my proposal can be found on the
> website for GSoC 2014 (I am not exactly sure how to get to it from the
> outside though, sorry), however the brief description of my project is to
> specify and implement a domain specific language to start a virtual machine,
> execute given commands, and store the results of the given command. Then,
> using a text comparison tool (maybe something similar to `diff'), compare
> the obtained output to the expected output.
>
> I was currently thinking that this would mainly be used for doing repeated
> testing of software on FreeBSD running in a virtual machine, however I was
> interested to see if anyone had any ideas for other uses or applications for
> this language so that I could focus on making it as useful as possible for
> what people would actually be using it for, or if anyone had any other
> comments or suggestions?
>
> I was also wondering if anyone would be interested in mentoring me for my
> project this summer?
>
> Finally, as I am new to this mailing list, if this is not the correct place
> to ask this question or anything else like that please let me know so I can
> move my question to the correct place.
>
> Thank you!
>

I could certainly make use of this in bhyve development.

For e.g., whenever we make changes to bhyve there is a large test
matrix that needs to be addressed:
- various guest OSes: FreeBSD (various releases), Linux (various
flavors), OpenBSD etc.
- 32-bit or 64-bit virtual machine
- number of vcpus and guest memory sizes
- multiple device emulations (virtio, ahci, passthru)
- timer modes (PIT, LAPIC, HPET, ACPI)
- interrupt delivery (8259, legacy, MSI, MSI-X)
- shutdown types (reboot, halt, acpi power off)

A tool like the one you are proposing would be very useful to catch regressions.

best
Neel

> --John
>
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