Re: [Xen-devel] [Project Idea]:-Want a guidance for the project

[George Dunlap <george.dunlap@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2011-10-06 at 17:11 +0100, Pratik shinde wrote:
> Although is a challenging project and would be very interesting to do,
> if we decide to go ahead with it, 
> I'm concerned about just one other thing, i.e. does this have a strong
> use-case?
> As in, how much would this benefit the users of Xen, if they could
> have a co-scheduler? 

First of all, in the Xen community, "co-scheduling" has a different
meaning: it has to do with making the scheduler aware of the
relationship between a VM and its stubdomain, driver domain, or other
service domains.  So you should probably come up with a different term
for what you're trying to do.

Secondly, if you're thinkinking about getting your code into the
mainline Xen tree, there are two options: you could try to get gang
scheduling into the default scheduler, or you could try getting an
alternate scheduler added.  The bar for both would be pretty high.

Regarding getting gang scheduling into the default scheduler: Most of
the Xen developers think that gang scheduling isn't the right solution
to the problem, and that paravirtualization of guest synchronization
primitives is the right solution.  So to get changes made to the default
Xen scheduler, you'd have to make a convincing argument (including
extensive testing of multiple workloads) that gang scheduling would be
an improvement over the current situation.

Regarding getting in an alternate scheduler: You'd need to convince the
community that (1) there are a reasonable number of users who would want
to use it, and (2) that you are able and willing to maintain it going
forward.  If you were a company, that would not be difficult (see the
arinc scheduler, for example).  But since you are students, you
currently don't have any users, and most likely you will disappear after
your project is done.  Disappearing after your project is done is a
perfectly reasonable thing to do, but it does leave the community stuck
trying to support your code.

Gang scheduling would certainly teach you a lot about OSes and
scheduling, and so I'm sure it's a valuable learning tool.

If you want some other ideas for undergraduate-level projects, you might
look at the recent Google Summer-of-code suggestions, which can be found
here:
 http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/GSoC_2011_ideas

These are projects that are definitely valuable to the community.  How
much help you get will depend mostly on how likely we think you are to
be able to succeed. 

 -George


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