Re: [Qemu-devel] [GSoC] Wanted: small warmup tasks

[Peter Crosthwaite]

Hi Jan,

IDEA1:

"Convert existing device models to use FIFO API" is one. FIFO API is a
factored out circular buffer helper that avoids having all the head
and tail pointer arithmetic in every device model.

Check util/fifo.c

git grep -i fifo hw

will hit candidate device models.

The biggest obstacle is VMSD. But for ARM VMSD version bumps are
torerable and for Microblaze (which has several candidates) they are a
total non issue. In some cases FIFO API use cases can be converted
with full backwards compatibility (like I did for serial.c) if you
resort to migrating the private struct fields.

IDEA2:

Convert conditional compilation of debug printfs to regular ifs.

good:

#ifdef DEBUG_FOO
#define DEBUG_FOO 0
#endif

#define DB_PRINTF \
  if (DEBUG_FOO) { \
     fprintf(...) \
  }

bad:

#ifdef DEBUG_FOO
#define DB_PRINTF
     fprintf(...) \
#else
#define DB_PRINTF do { } while(0);
#endif

The reasoning is so that debug messages and their formats will always
be compile tested regardless of whether they are wanted at run time.

Regards,
Peter

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 4:19 PM, Jan Kiszka <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 2014-04-23 11:25, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>> Dear QEMU, Libvirt, and KVM communities,
>> We are participating in Google Summer of Code 2014
>> (http://google-melange.com/) and Outreach Program for Women
>> (http://opw.gnome.org/).  Both programs fund candidates to work on our
>> open source projects for 12 weeks this summer.
>
> To follow up on this: I'm currently looking for optional tiny "warmup"
> tasks for our QEMU students during the bonding period (till May 18). If
> you have any trivial issues or extensions in mind that someone could
> address within a few days or even hours, that would be perfect. It could
> even be something like "reformat the printing of these messages" or so.
>
> We used this mechanism last year with the KVM student quite
> successfully. The idea is to give the student very early a chance to get
> in contact with the community and with the patch submission & review
> procedure. So the focus is more on dealing with patches than on solving
> a technical problem in QEMU. If all works fine, this should encourage
> her/him to work with the community right from the beginning, ask
> question, post things early etc.
>
> Jan
>
>