Subject: Re: [vserver] Roadmap and Future ...
From: Dallas Kashuba <dallas@dreamhost.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:38:15 -0800


On Feb 26, 2009, at 7:30 AM, Herbert Poetzl wrote:

> One proposal I have (which was actually tested over
> the years, and seems to work - at least for me) would
> be that Companies using Linux-VServer get some kind
> of 'Service Contract' with a Developer (which is a
> good thing anyway), ranging between a single hour
> per month up to a day per week, for, let's say 100
> EUR per hour, which can be consumed or not, where in
> the latter case, this time will be spent on general
> Linux-VServer development and testing. (if you like
> that idea, please contact me and I'm certain we can
> arrange something)
>
> The big advantage over occasional donations is that
> the developer can 'somewhat' rely on that income and
> does not need to 'hope' for an upcoming donation.


I think you are on the right track here as far as making it possible  
to spend more of your available time on the project.  DreamHost  
currently provides some amount of ongoing financial support to several  
open source projects we rely on and would also be interested in this  
case.


> Now for the Roadmap:
>
> I think what we need most in the near future is a
> new, well tested stable release, which can be adopted
> by distributions and which will be maintained for
> a reasonable amount of time, and that's actually what
> I'm working on whenever time permits.
>
> New features will mainly include adaptations of 'old'
> features, lost and forgotten over time, and improve-
> ments on the mainline integration (like cgroups and
> such), as well as some virtualizations to simplify
> handling and make it more guest friendly.
>
> One upcoming mainline feature which I will try to
> integrate as soon as it is available is the check-
> pointing and resume functionality.
>
> I also plan to do a web frontend to control basic
> functionality and a minimalistic host distribution
> to run Linux-VServer Guests on, but I have no idea
> when I will find time for that.
>
> Finally, as usual, input here is welcome, so if you
> have an isolation feature you want to see really soon,
> or further questions, please let me know.


When I first started using Linux-Vserver the biggest obstacle was lack  
of clear documentation. Once I figured out which documents could tell  
me what, it got easier.  Right now, though, there's a lack of  
documentation on how to use the newer cgroup-based scheduling.  In my  
opinion, the biggest weakness of the project today is a lack of  
organized documentation.  That is clearly something that could be done  
by a volunteer and it's perhaps not the absolute best use of time for  
one of the programmers, but on the other hand it does need to be done  
by somebody.


	Dallas