Linaro Connect edition...

RAG: GREEN: productive Connect, hammered out a KVM TODO list

* As usual, most sessions don't really intersect with KVM/QEMU work, so the bulk of the benefit of the week was in informal discussions and hacking sessions. Useful outcomes there: * Dragged Rusty through some of the more obscure corners of the ARM architecture, in the course of doing a review of all the A15 cp15 registers and how KVM should handle them * Thrashed out a todo list for getting to "initial upstreamable patchset" for KVM: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TSpDKQZ-6u-HH_2BNY_85jDStI2YDhENf5-z8NbF... * Nailed down a few decisions we'd left hanging for a bit * A few sessions that seem worth mentioning: * Enterprise bootloaders Jon M definitely pushing the idea that servers will want ACPI, UEFI, etc all to look as consistent and like x86 as possible. This includes a desire for UEFI in the virtual environment provided by QEMU/KVM. We've been aware we might want to do that, but there is definitely some work to do to get UEFI running (probably a combo of QEMU bugfixes/feature work and patching UEFI). Total work required hard to estimate because you just have to keep fixing bugs until it works... (The push for UEFI was repeated in a couple of other sessions too.) * v8 discussion The question of whether there will be a v8 QEMU was raised (again). There do seem to be enough people interested that we should be able to collaborate on a user-mode emulator, which I think is a good outcome. This will obviously depend on release of enough public info on the architecture. * KVM performance Bit of a null session, as it turns out that we aren't really ready to think about performance. We believe there aren't any obvious areas requiring optimisation in the current KVM patchset. Virtio is the only thing to be added later, and this is really just missing QEMU side rather than needing specific kernel support. We did take the opportunity to go through our TODO list for KVM functionality; nobody raised anything we'd missed, so that's good.

-- PMM