Design Sessions

We are excited to announce the call for speaking proposals for Xen Project Developer and Design Summit 2018.

The Xen Project Developer and Design Summit combines the formats of Xen Project Developer Summits with Xen Project Hackathons in a larger and combined event, bringing together the Xen Project’s community of developers and power users for their annual developer conference.

Before you submit, please note that we have a new Design Session system which will require you to register and enter a verification code before submitting.
Please email xenevents@linuxfoundation.org to receive the verification code. Thank you!

SUBMIT A PROPOSAL

Design Sessions

CFP Closes: Friday, June 22, 2018

In the tradition of the Xen Project Hackathons, we will not run Design Sessions through the Program Management Committee, as long as we have enough space to host sessions.  Sessions can still be proposed on the day of the event through the Design Session system.

Whenever new sessions come in, Lars will update the system every two weeks, and the Design Session system will carry the tentative schedule until sessions are marked finalized onsite.  Design Sessions are scheduled using the following criteria:
  • Schedule sessions on a day which has similar topics to the ones already proposed (makes the live scheduling sessions at the event easier)
  • Schedule sessions on (or after) a day where related talks take place (creates more valuable discussions)
  • Schedule such that people which have multiple sessions get some breathing space (aka avoid that everyone has all their sessions on one day)
Note that we will have some rooms with a projector, others won’t.
  • If you submit design sessions and you need a projector, please add this under “List any technical requirements that you have for your presentation over and above the standard projector, screen and wireless internet”
  • If you need to have your session on a specific day due to travel constraints, please add this under “List any technical requirements…”
The purpose of publishing design sessions as they come in is twofold:
  • let you know what others are planning to do (avoids duplicate sessions)
  • marketing (attracts attendees)
You can propose new design sessions every day of the event, but we prefer if you proposed them using the submission system.
As in the past at Hackathons we will try and balance the schedule and merge related sessions as a group in a 30 minute scheduling session.  I am also happy getting feedback from community members on this thread: to facilitate this, I will post schedule updates every other week or so.
*Note that there are NO COMPLIMENTARY PASSES for Design Session Moderators.

Suggested Topics for Design and Problem Solving Sessions:

The aim of the Design and Problem Solving sessions are to give developers the opportunity to meet face-to-face to:

  • Coordinate and plan upcoming features
  • Discuss and agree on best practices and changes to how the community works
  • Discuss and agree on the design and architecture of future functionality
  • Interactive lessons learned sessions covering experiences of contributors, users and vendors

Examples of Design and Problem Solving Sessions from past Hackathons were:

  • Cadence of Xen Project and maintenance releases
  • Changes to the COLO architecture and interdependencies with migration v2
  • Developing the architecture and design for Xen Project live patching
  • Effectiveness of new Xen Project security policy
  • Evolution of virtual machine introspection (including HW assistance) in the Xen Hypervisor
  • How to de-privileging QEMU and the x86 emulator to reduce the impact of security vulnerabilities in those components,
  • Implementing KConfig support which allows to remove parts of Xen at compile time and run-time disablement of Xen features to reduce Xen’s trusted computing base.
  • Planning the next stage of PVH (which led to a re-think and PVH v2)
  • Planning sessions for Xen Hardware support, including:
    • How to implement PCI passthrough on ARM
    • How we can improve testing for the increasing range of ARM HW with support for virtualization
    • How to implement alt2pm on Intel architectures
  • Release planning
  • Restartable Dom0 and driver domains
  • Testing and testing frameworks

Sample Submissions

Design and Planning Sessions

If you are proposing a design and planning session, please clearly state:

  1. The problem that you are trying to solve
  2. How attendees of the session can contribute to solving your problem
  3. Whether any preparation work is desirable (including links to existing material)

The proposer of design and planning sessions is expected to moderate sessions, which are held in smaller breakout rooms that are equipped with whiteboards. Some rooms will also contain projectors. Moderators can give a short presentation to introduce the problem, but design and planning sessions are not presentations. As a guide, presentations should not exceed more than 25% of the overall session time. Sessions will not be recorded, but we expect that the moderator either takes minutes or nominates an attendee to do so. Minutes will be posted on the relevant mailing list. (Note that design and planning sessions only scale well to a maximum of 30 people.)

First Time Submitting? Don’t Feel Intimidated

We know that the open source community can be very intimidating for anybody who is interested in participating.

Xen Project events are an excellent way to get to know the community and share your ideas and the work that you are doing. You do not need to be a maintainer or a chief architect to submit a proposal. In fact, we strongly encourage first-time speakers to submit talks for all of our events. In the instance that you aren’t sure about your abstract, reach out to us and we will be more than happy to work with you on your proposal.

Our events are working conferences intended for professional networking and collaboration in the Xen community and we work closely with our attendees, sponsors and speakers to help keep Xen Project events professional, welcoming and friendly. If you have any questions about participating please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Sponsors

DIAMOND

Citrix
Huawei

GOLD

ARM