[Publicity] Draft blog fost from Sisu on Real-Time Xen

[Dario Faggioli <dario.faggioli@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Everyone,

Sisu Xi, from Washington University in St. Louis, prepared a blog post
about his project, RT-Xen (Real-Time Xen) for our blog.

The draft is here, waiting for your reviews:
 http://blog.xen.org/?p=8396&preview=true

(Please, keep Sisu in Cc, as I don't think he's subscribed to this
list.)

About publishing time, I think it depends whether we want to send out
the ARM DT blog post this week or not. If no, this could go out during
the week, if yes, it well can wait.

Sisu, first of all, thanks for doing this, it's a really good job
already. Find here some comments about it.

First of all, who's speaking? You say 'we', and that's fine, but it's
probably worth to tell the reader who is that 'we'. :-) Something like
the name of your research lab, some definition for the group of people,
within your department, working on RT-Xen, ...

I would add some context, probably at the very beginning. Something
about the (increasing) importance of real-time support in
virtualization, and hence in Xen. I'm sure you have some stuff about
this (if not, what else you put  in the "Introduction" and "Motivation"
sections of your papers? :-P :-P) and, in any case, I can help with
that.

I would also break it down int paragraph a bit more clearly, i.e.,
providing a couple of titles/headlines, but let's first see the content
in its final shape and then we'll see how to do this.

Also, links. In general, e.g., when you cite the credit scheduler you
can link to the credit Wiki page on Xen's wiki, when you cite EDF and DM
you can link to some Wikipedia article, or other publicly available
material, etc. In particular, links related to your project. There's an
URL at the end, but I'd move it up in the post and make it an actual
hyperlink. Also, you've got a github repo with the code... Put a few
words and a link to it too.

Actually, the post is all about describing the project. If you want to
add a paragraph about how to fetch, install, and use it (differences wrt
installing upstream Xen, how to use the new schedulers, etc... Just a
few words, and then the relevant links to your website), I think it
could be interesting, but I leave this to you to decide.

When you say "The users can specify (budget, period, CPU mask)", I think
this requires a better explanation. Right now you have "thus not only
the VCPU gets a resource reservation (budget/period), but also an
explicit timing information for the CPU resources (period)", which is a
nice summary, but I'd be a little be more explicit, since you really
want the reader to understand the concept of resource reservation, and
how budget and period relate to that. Actually, the phrase I quoted
above is pretty good at describing what period is, so add something
about the budget... Perhaps we can move this "For each VCPU, the budget
is reset at each starting point of the period (all in milli seconds),
consumed when the VCPU is executing, and deferred when the VCPU has
budget but no work to do" here (and put the result in a bulleted list or
something like that).
I'd consider adding a picture too... If you want, I can see if I have
something nice from one of my research paper on the subject.

Finally, "We are in actively development of integrating both schedulers
into the Xen mainstream", since an official submission to xen-devel
didn't happened yet, I'd probably say something like "we are really
interested in" or "we are looking at how". And just to be clear, I'm not
complaining about that, I just trying to make the post more
representative of the actual situation, so that an interested reader
does not get disappointed by not finding patches, etc. :-)

Thanks again and Regards,
Dario

-- 
<<This happens because I choose it to happen!>> (Raistlin Majere)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Dario Faggioli, Ph.D, http://about.me/dario.faggioli
Senior Software Engineer, Citrix Systems R&D Ltd., Cambridge (UK)

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