[ovirt-devel] [vdsm][virt] what's new in virt (20151215)

[Francesco Romani]

Hi all,

I'm happy to start a weekly summary of what's going on on virt's world (VDSM edition).

General topics
* I've got some mixed feedback about my Vm-on-a-diet effort. I still believe that fat trimming
  is a worthwhile goal per se, but I'm willing to adapt the strategy responding to the comments,
  so we will focus on virt-specific topics.
* As consequence of the above, I'm focusing on the last bits of device fixing, which involves
  - fixing all device to update themselves from libvirt XML after domain boot, instead using
    all the getUnderyling* methods
  - switch the devices related code to use Etree instead of minidom. This will involve changes to
    the domain_descriptor.
  I estimate this task will still trim ~600 lines out of vm.py, so it still somehow gets some
  size trimming done, albeit not intensive as planned.
  This is a complex topic, will post plan and ideas on a separate mail
* Finally, some series are still worth pushing forward, see below.

Patches in need of attention
* topic branches
- mpolednik started a much needed cleanup and fixing of fake_qemu and fake_kvm code, with the ultimate goal to move all
  the remaining bits into the faqemu hook, and to make it useful on ppc64.
  Lots of refactoring is needed to support this change, and that produced
  https://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/q/topic:cpuinfo
- we want to improve the reporting in case of migratio aborted. The ultimate goal is to let Engine (thus the User)
  know why a migration failed. To export this information, however, we need some cleanup before. Hence:
  https://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/q/status:open+project:vdsm+branch:master+topic:migration_report
- last and less urgent: here's some cleanup about existing getUnderlying* methods of Vm class, preparing
  the last step of the big vmdevices split. I believe this is useful anyway
  https://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/q/status:open+project:vdsm+branch:master+topic:vm-trim-stage-1-p4-pre

* single patches
- https://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/46846
  this is the first of a series aiming to improve migration support in 4.0. Probably worth merging all together,
  even though this one seems ready for broader review to me.
- https://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/49173/
  Notified just to raise awareness, still working on ensuring backward compatibility and smooth upgrade
- https://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/48672
  v2v xen support
- https://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/49951/
  OVA support improvements. Worth a look, but note that we are working toward a split of this big patch
- https://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/49636
  V2V refactoring, also almost ready
- https://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/49570/
  still in the context of migration enhancements. We want to throttle incoming migrations, to do so we want
  to use a sempahore which needs to be held by the creation thread until VM is created.
  This helper makes this possible, using an uniform interface for both this case and the common, simpler case.

That's all for now, as usual, reviews welcome! :)

-- 
Francesco Romani
RedHat Engineering Virtualization R & D
Phone: 8261328
IRC: fromani