I am Utkarsh Anand, a second year undergraduate student studying at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. I have been using linux since the year 2009. I am familiar with many programming languages (C, C++, Python, _javascript_ etc. to name a few). I would like to apply for "Make Anita support multiple virtual machine systems" as GSoC 2017 project. I have already gone through the entire code of anita 1.40. I had a few questions related to the project:
1. It looks like it already had support for xen, although, the page:
http://www.gson.org/netbsd/anita/ says that it has 'experimental support'. So, are there any issues that need to be resolved? Or any features that need to be added? I'd like to know about it.
2. Line nos. 125-132 (the function definition for make_dense_image) define a function for creating a file of given file size. Was there any advantage (as in speed etc.) for choosing to write your own function instead of something like
<code>
ret = os.spawnvp(os.P_WAIT,'dd',['dd','if=/dev/zero','of=/home/utkarsh/new.img','bs=1MiB','count=10'])
if not ret:
print("image created!")
</code>
We could get the block size, count and filename from the user, just like the original function and the user name from the environment variable USER.
3. If the xen support is complete, the only thing left to do is virtualbox support, which should be similar to qemu and xen. Am I right?
4. What other modules would you like to add?
Lastly, I would like to assure that I am ready to put in any amount of effort required for the project.
Thanking You,
Utkarsh Anand