ACRN Future Development Ideas & Concepts

Introduction

The intent for this wiki page is to capture the ideas and requirements from everyone on what would be useful next to implement in ACRN. The list below does not indicate that there is any engineering commitment behind those, nor does it even indicate that it is feasible. What we want to achieve is to capture those ideas, see who is interested in (co-)developing them and hopefully see some being implemented over time.

Key themes for 2021

There are some key themes actively pursued at present:

1. Investigate and implement nested virtualization
2. Improve the Out-of-the-Box Experience (OOBE)
3. Improved the Developer eXperience (DX)
4. Code clean-up and modularization

Other areas that are of interest (some captured via the mailing list) include:

Idea	Owner	Notes
Increase number of VMs supported by ACRN
Support for initramfs
Support for new architectures (e.g. ARM)
Support for new Intel processor families (e.g. Xeon)
Enhance Build infrastructure
Support for PCI Serial Port card
Support for USB Serial Port		Likely not a good idea as it would mean adding a USB stack to the hypervisor which would impact the total LOC
Decision tree for selecting a HW platform

What's next

You have seen a topic you are interested in, or you have a different idea... so you wonder: what do I do now?

• If your idea isn't one in the table above, start by adding it (by editing this wiki page), and put your name against it.
• Bring this up to the ACRN Users mailing list.
• Depending on the complexity of the feature, it may be a good idea to create a wiki page for it where you can put all you thoughts, architectural diagrams, etc.
• Start getting familiar with the ACRN Developer Guidelines

(To Be Continued)