Re: [Publicity] How to post the draft blog article?

[Jonathan Davies <jonathan.davies@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dario Faggioli wrote:
> Ok, I just made your user an 'Editor'. Can you try again to add a post?
>
> If it still does not work, ask me back, I'll look into it.

Thanks Dario, that has worked perfectly.

Publicity folks, you can view my draft at 
http://blog.xen.org/?p=8238&preview=true. And I've copied-and-pasted it 
below for convenience.
Is this the kind of thing you had in mind? Let me know if I'm pitching it 
in a different direction to what you had hoped. All feedback welcome.
-------
Last week I was in Edinburgh to attend my first Xen Project Developer 
Summit. It turned out quite different from my expectations, so I thought 
I'd share a bit about my experience.
When I first saw the <a 
href="http://www.xenproject.org/about/events/viewevent/28-xen-project-developer-summit-call-for-participation.html";>call 
for participation</a> I wasn't sure that I had anything sufficiently 
relevant to contribute that would be of interest to the community. But I 
decided there wouldn't be any harm in submitting a proposal for a talk, and 
it came as a bit of a surprise when I learned that it had been accepted.
My day job is to work on the performance and scalability of <a 
href="http://www.xenserver.org/";>XenServer</a>, Citrix's enterprise-grade 
virtualisation platform built on Xen. The XenServer engineering team had 
recently made <a 
href="http://www.xenserver.org/discuss-virtualization/virtualization-blog/entry/how-did-we-increase-vm-density-in-xenserver-6-2.html";>great 
strides in improving VM density scalability</a> so it was natural for <a 
href="http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/jonathandavies-xenserver-vm-density-20131024_1.pdf";>my 
talk</a> to be on this topic. The reason for my uncertainty over the 
relevance of this talk was that it was all about stuff built around the 
hypervisor and not so much about the hypervisor itself. Evidently I was 
wrong to assume that this wouldn't be of interest.
<strong>So who's in the Xen community?</strong>

Once my talk had been accepted, I looked forward to attending and seeing 
what the Xen community looks like. My expectation was that it would be a 
meeting of the regulars on the <a 
href="http://lists.xenproject.org/mailman/listinfo/xen-devel";>xen-devel 
mailing list</a> verbalising the same kind of discussions as are typically 
held on there. This wouldn't have been a bad thing, but I'd have been an 
outsider on the sidelines, being unable to give or take a lot from this.
But I was wrong. The attendees constituted a surprisingly broad group of 
people. There were some from academia, others from industry. There were 
some doing research and others commercialising it. There were some who were 
hacking on the Xen hypervisor itself and others involved with construction 
of products built on top of it.
<strong>What about the talks?</strong>

Compared to similar-sized conferences I've attended in other fields of 
technology in the past, the quality of talks delivered at the Xen Developer 
Summit was generally very high; I was impressed. And there was an excellent 
range of presentations, covering a good variety of topics. I was surprised 
to find that there were many that were relevant to my own work. I was 
especially interested by talks on:
<ul>
	<li>performance and scalability improvements in Xen (e.g. <a 
href="http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/clickos_xendevsummit2013.pdf";>Joao 
Martins' networking performance work</a>, <a 
href="http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/xensummit2013-pvtcp.pdf";>Luwei 
Cheng's research on TCP performance in VMs</a> and <a 
href="http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/unlimited-event-channels.pdf";>David 
Vrabel's proposal for supporting an unlimited number of event 
channels</a>);</li>
	<li>performance analyses (<a 
href="http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/20131025%20-%20Storage%20Performance%20PDF.pdf";>Felipe 
Franciosi's deep-dive into the storage datapath</a>);</li>
	<li>tools support for performance analysis (<a 
href="http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/XenPMU_XenSummit2013.pdf";>Boris 
Ostrovsky's update on perf support</a>); and</li>
	<li>testing (<a 
href="http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/XenSummit%20TaaS%20and%20XenRT_0.pdf";>Alex 
Brett's overview of XenRT</a> and Ian Jackson's description of osstest).</li>
</ul>

But it wasn't all about performance! For those with interest in other 
topics, there was plenty of content concerning Xen-on-ARM, Android support, 
GPU integration, security, microkernel VMs, and a lot more.
So I very much enjoyed my first Xen Developer Summit. There was a real buzz 
around the Xen community. I learned a lot and made some great contacts, and 
hope that I'll be able to return to future Summits.
-------

Thanks,
Jonathan

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