• Contact: port-xen
• Mentors: Jean-Yves Migeon
• Duration estimate: 3-6 months, depending on subsystem considered

This project's work is composed of smaller components that can be worked on independently from others, all related to the Xen port.

Xen has support of a number of machine-dependent features that NetBSD currently does not implement for the x86's port of the Xen architecture. Notably:

• PCI passthrough, where PCI devices can be exposed to a guest via Xen protected mem/regs mappings;
• IOMMU (Intel's VT-d, or AMD's IOV) that protects memory access from devices for I/O, needed for safe operation of PCI/device passthrough;
• ACPI, and more specifically, ACPI states. Most commonly used on native systems to suspend/resume/shutdown a host;
• CPU and memory hotplugging;
• more elaborate VM debugging through gdbx, a lightweight debugger included with Xen.

The purpose of this project is to either add the missing parts inside NetBSD (some requiring native implementation first like IOMMU), or implement the needed interface to plug current native x86 systems (like pmf(9) for ACPI hypercalls).