Re: Intention to work on GSoC project

[Eugenio Perez Martin]

On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 9:32 AM Stefano Garzarella <sgarzare@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Sahil,
>
> On Sun, Feb 25, 2024 at 10:38 PM Sahil <icegambit91@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > My name is Sahil and I go by the pseudonym 'valdaarhun' on Github. I have
> > never contributed to QEMU before but I have used it a few times as an end
> > user. I developed an interest in virtualization during my internship at
> > VMware and would like to dive deeper in this subfield.
> >
> > My current full-time job does not allow me to take part in external programs
> > that are paid. I would like to work on one of the proposed projects outside
> > of GSoC.
>
> Sure, not a problem at all, also because for this year QEMU was not
> accepted in GSoC, so anybody can work on those projects if they have
> time
>
> > I have gone through QEMU's list of GSoC '24 projects [1] and am
> > interested in two of them:
> >
> > 1. Add packed virtqueue to Shadow Virtqueue
> > 2. vhost-user memory isolation
> >
> > Based on what I have understood, they are somewhat related and are part
> > of the migration subsystem. I feel the learning curve of the first project
> > will be less steep and will make me better prepared to tackle the second
> > project as well.
>
> The first project is for sure related with migration. While vhost-user
> memory isolation is not really related to migration, but both are
> related to virtio devices.
> Anyway, your plan looks good to me!
>

I agree with all Stefano's answers above.

> >
> > I have read the "Getting Started for Developers" [2] wiki page. I have also
> > built QEMU from source.
>
> Great!
>
> >
> > I think my next step should be to read the documentation on the migration
> > subsystem [3], the blog posts attached in the first project's description
> > and virtqueue's implementation.

You can add the recently published
"virtio-live-migration-technical-deep-dive" :) [1].

[1] 
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2024/02/21/virtio-live-migration-technical-deep-dive

> > Would you also recommend that I work on a
> > QEMU issue that is open on Gitlab and related to virtqueues/virtio to
> > familiarize
> > myself with the codebase? I went through the issues tagged as 
> > "device:virtio"
> > [4]
> > but can't really tell if any of them are good for beginners. One of them has
> > the
> > "bite-size" tag [5]. It also has a patch attached but hasn't been merged.
> > Shall I
> > work on getting that merged?
>
> Yeah, "bite-size" issues should be better to understand how to
> contribute to QEMU.
> Feel free to work on any issue, doing the work or helping to complete
> old patches.
>

Right,

There are few other tasks pending for QEMU in general and SVQ in
particular. I'll add them as gitlab issues by today.

Thanks!

> >
> > I have worked on a few smaller systems programming issues in other
> > organizations (eg: strace [6], htop [7]) in the past.
> >
> > I look forward to hearing from you.
>
> Feel free to reach us if you have more questions on the projects.
>
> Thanks,
> Stefano
>