Re: Mentor of the Project "PCI frontend XEN PV driver"？

[Justin T. Gibbs]

On Apr 11, 2013, at 9:11 PM, Bei Guan <gbtju85 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> It seems there's no mentor for the GSoC project “PCI frontend XEN PV driver” on page https://wiki.freebsd.org/IdeasPage#PCI_frontend_XEN_PV_driver 
> So whom can I contact to know more about this project?
> Thank you very much.
> 
> 
> Best Regards,
> Gavin

This particular project was proposed for last year's GSoC when both attilio at FreeBSD.org and I were actively working on full Xen PV support for FreeBSD.  That project still continues, but at a slower pace due to changing needs at our respective employers.  Given the lack of maturity of our Xen PV port, I think this would be a difficult project to attempt at this time.

If you are interested in Xen and have access to x86 hardware with HVM capabilities, writing a SCSI or USB PV frontend for FreeBSD is a better project to select.  FreeBSD's Xen HVM support is very robust and, unlike the PCI frontend driver, these drivers can be developed using an HVM guest.  The resulting drivers should work equally well in full PV mode (with perhaps a few minor tweaks) when it is better supported.

I will update the wiki sometime tomorrow with more information on Xen projects that are appropriate for this year's GSoC.

--
Justin