oVirt on IBM POWER (PPC64) - new feature contributors

[Michal Skrivanek]

On May 21, 2013, at 17:33 , Leonardo Bianconi <leonardo.bianconi at eldorado.org.br> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> We are planning to deliver support for PPC64 in 4 phases. We will manage to deliver a set of patches at the end of each phase.
> 
> Phase 1
> 
> 	 Change oVirt to handle other architectures by encapsulating all the architecture specific code and queries about the capabilities of the hypervisor into a new class called ArchStrategy (based on the Strategy Design Pattern). Every operation involving clusters and hosts will be validated by this new class. Some hard-coded parameters are going to be replaced by queries in the backend in order to accommodate the support for new architectures into the engine.

If you would like to discuss some internals or if anything is unclear please feel free to set up a quick mtg with myself, Omer and Roy.
Sometimes (e.g. in the case of VmInterfaceType as mentioned on feature page) it would be actually beneficial for oVirt on x86 as well to have a greater flexibility directly in the code, without Strategy encapsulation.

> 
> 
> Phase 2
> 
> 	Currently, each host hypervisor capabilities are obtained using hard-coded data structures. These structures will be replaced either by some form of integration with libosinfo or by reading internal configuration files describing these capabilities. It will be handled after Roy's patch.
Roy's osinfo will soon be merged.

> 
> 
> Phase 3
> 
> 	The code for providing the support for IBM POWER systems will be added. The encapsulation done in the previous phase will reduce the effort to include this feature into the engine. The other changes that will be introduced in this phase include:
> 
> 	- Modifications in the frontend to avoid running a VM created on a POWER host in a x86-64 host (and vice-versa), 
> 	- All the dynamically provided capacities of the first phase will be implemented according to the capacities of the QEMU/KVM on POWER
> 	- The POWER processors will be available as an option in the list of processor names (this will imply in significant changes in the backend)
> 
> 
> Phase 4
> 
> 	Adapt secondary features to polish the support for POWER:
> 
> 	- OVF import and export of VMs running in POWER hosts
> 	- Dynamic searches capable of finding hosts, pools, vms and clusters according to their architectures
> 
> 
> Is there any ongoing oVirt architecture refactoring ? (that may conflict with Phase 1, for instance)
no, nothing major going on

> 
> Any comments ?
Looking forward to your patches!:-)

Thanks,
michal

> 
> Regards,
> Vitor (vitor.lima at eldorado.org.br) / Leonardo (leonardo.bianconi at eldorado.org.br)
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Neary [mailto:dneary at redhat.com] 
> Sent: quarta-feira, 15 de maio de 2013 12:25
> To: Leonardo Bianconi
> Cc: arch at ovirt.org; Adam Litke
> Subject: Re: oVirt on IBM POWER (PPC64) - new feature contributors
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On 05/14/2013 08:05 PM, Leonardo Bianconi wrote:
>> We would like to introduce ourselves: Leonardo Bianconi and Vitor Lima.
> 
> Welcome!
> 
>> We would like to work on the features "Engine support for PPC64" (http://wiki.ovirt.org/Features/Engine_support_for_PPC64) and the "Vdsm for PPC64" (http://wiki.ovirt.org/Features/Vdsm_for_PPC64). This work has already been started by some developers at IBM.
> 
> <snip>
> 
>> About libosinfo:
>> =============
>> 
>> In the previous discussion about this topic (http://lists.ovirt.org/pipermail/arch/2012-November/000976.html), occurred in November 2012, it was suggested that integrating the libosinfo into the engine would be a better way to handle the differences between the architectures that would be supported in the future.
>> 
>> Is this approach still valid? If so, when will it be available? It seems to be a dependency for oVirt "Engine_support_for_PPC64" feature implementation.
> 
> 
> This is great news. I don't know who, specifically, has been working on this issue in IBM - perhaps Adam Litke (CCed) can update you on the progress that has been made.

> 
> Cheers,
> Dave.
> 
> --
> Dave Neary - Community Action and Impact Open Source and Standards, Red Hat - http://community.redhat.com
> Ph: +33 9 50 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13
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