Xen.org Stefano Stabellini Developer

Xen.org Stefano Stabellini Developer Interview July 21, 2009 from xen_com_mgr on Vimeo.

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Stefano talked at this last SVLUG meeting. 

Wednesday, Aug. 3^rd, 2011 General Meeting

Stefano Stabellin Topic: Xen Support in the Linux Kernel: Upstream Efforts and Recent Developments 

Fwd: [svlug-announce] SVLUG Aug. 3nd meeting: Xen Support in the Linux Kernel: Upstreaming Efforts and New Developments

His talk in was called Xen: Past - Present and Future.

He spoke about a new Device Driver Architecture, Where DOM0 and stub domains share memory pages with other VM's used for communications. This is called the XEN Bus


Advantages of using a VM
Small surface of attack
Isolation
Resilience

Specialized Algorythems such as the Schedualer

Type1 and Type2 Hypervisors.

Type1 is like XEN, and VMWare that run with a DOM0 or basically the OS that provides native driver support runs over the VM not under.

Type2 is Runs over a native OS such as Virtual Box, (VMWare also has a version to support this also)  , KVM

It was unknown what type Parallels Virtuoso was.

dom0, Primary OS that talks to real hardware and manages VM.
domU, Guest OS's that are run on the system. 



PV (Para Virtualization) is where a special OS or drivers for the OS are used to communication with VM aware drivers, rather then having to emulate native hardware.

Where
HVM (Hardware-assisted Virtual Machine).  Simulates the whole PC including PCI hardware.
This is slower and less efficient.



History
Xen was a research product at Cambridge .


PV (Para Virtualization) support went in the 2.6.26 (so fairly recent)
dom0 support in to 2.6.37
NetBack 2.6.39  network backend drivers
BlkBack 3.0.0    block backend drivers



To run a Type1 hypervisor dom0 the OS needs to support it, Fedora and Ubuntu had for a while but dropped it's support as too much to maintain. This is resolve with the inclusion in the main kernel branch.
Linux 3.0.0 Kernel has native support.


Book of Xen

Chapter 1: Xen: A High-Level Overview
Chapter 2: Getting Started
Chapter 3: Provisioning domUs
Chapter 4: Storage with Xen
Chapter 5: Networking
Chapter 6: domU Management: Tools and Frontends
Chapter 7: Hosting Untrusted Users Under Xen: Lessons from the Trenches
Chapter 8: Beyond Linux: Using Xen with Other Unix-like OSs
Chapter 9: Xen Migration
Chapter 10: Profiling and Benchmarking Under Xen
Chapter 11: Citrix XenServer: Xen for the Enterprise
Chapter 12: HVM: Beyond Paravirtualization
Chapter 13: Xen and Windows
Chapter 14: Tips
Chapter 15: Troubleshooting

Xen: Virtual Machines

QEMU: Generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.

 

http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenIntro

Xen: Virtual Machines

What is Xen Hypervisor?

The Xen hypervisor is a layer of software running directly on computer hardware replacing the operating system thereby allowing the computer hardware to run multiple guest operating systems concurrently. Support for x86, x86-64, Itanium, Power PC, and ARM processors allow the Xen hypervisor to run on a wide variety of computing devices and currently supports Linux, NetBSD,
FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows, and other common operating systems as guests running on the hypervisor.
The Xen.org community develops and maintains the Xen hypervisor as a free solution licensed under the GNU General Public License.

http://www.xen.org


http://www.xen.org/files/Marketing/WhatisXen.pdf

http://www.xen.org/community/xenhistory.html

• Xen at Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen
• Xen Overview (In Process) - http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenOverview
• Virtualization at Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization
• Xen Dom0 Kernels - http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenDom0Kernels
• Xen FAQ - http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenFaq
• Xen Case Studies - http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/Xen_Case_Studies
• Xen Books = http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/Books?highlight=%28books%29
• For Developers 
• The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor
• For Users
• The Book of Xen
• Running Xen: A Hands-on Guide to the Art of Virtualization

Update: Notes from SVLUG Meeting  Xen.org Stefano Stabellini Developer

Fwd: [svlug-announce] SVLUG Aug. 3nd meeting: Xen Support in the Linux Kernel: Upstreaming Efforts and New Developments

Update: Notes from SVLUG Meeting  Xen.org Stefano Stabellini Developer

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rick
Date: Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 4:19 PM
Subject: [svlug-announce] SVLUG Aug. 3rd meeting: Xen Support in the Linux Kernel: Upstreaming Efforts and New Developments
To: svlug-announce@lists.svlug.org



WHEN:

  Wednesday, Aug. 3nd, 2011
  7pm-9pm


MAIN PRESENTATION

 TOPIC:
   Xen Support in the Linux Kernel: Upstreaming Efforts and New
   Developments

 PRESENTED BY:
   Stefano Stabellini,
   Senior Software Engineer, Citrix R&D

 TOPIC SUMMARY:
   Xen (http://www.xen.org/) reuses many externals of open source
   projects, Qemu (http://qemu.org/) and Linux in particular.  During
   the first years of existence, Xen accumulated a large number of changes
   to these external projects, but then struggled to upstream them.

   In the last couple of years, the Xen community has been trying to
   remove the dependencies on downstream modifications, and establish
   better relationships with other open source communities.  What is the
   current status of Xen in relation with other free software projects?

   At the same time, Xen development proceeded at a fast pace, and several
   new features were introduced; this talk will go through one in
   particular: PV on HVM support in the Linux kernel.  Traditionally,
   Linux has always run on Xen either as a pure PV guest or as a
   virtualization-unaware guest in an HVM domain.  Under the name "PV on
   HVM", work has been done to make Linux aware that is running on Xen,
   and enable as many PV interfaces as possible, even when running in an
   HVM container.

 ABOUT THE PRESENTER:
   Stefano Stabellini (http://www.stabellini.net/) is a Senior
   Software Engineer at Citrix R&D (formerly XenSource, Ltd.), working
   on the open source Xen Platform
   (http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/feature.asp?contentID=1681747)
   team.  He has been working on Xen since 2007, focusing on several
   different projects, spanning from Qemu to the Linux kernel.  He
   currently maintains libxenlight
   (http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2009/11/09/libxenlight-released/),
   Xen support in Qemu, and PV on HVM
   (http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenLinuxPVonHVMdrivers) in the
   Linux kernel.  Before joining Citrix, he was a researcher at the
   Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (http://www.ihmc.us/),
   working on mobile ad hoc networks.

LOCATION:

   Symantec
   VCAFE Facility
   350 Ellis Street (near E. Middlefield Road)
   Mountain View, CA 94043

   Directions on how to get there are listed at:

   http://www.svlug.org/directions/veritas.php

 We've tried our very best for these directions to be accurate.
 If you have any improvements to make, please let SVLUG's volunteers know!
 webmaster at svlug.org

POST-MEETING GATHERING:

 If you just can't get enough, a smaller group usually goes to a local
 restaurant/diner after the meeting:  Frankie, Johnnie & Luigi, Too,
 939 West El Camino Real between Shoreline and Castro, Mountain View.

We look forward to seeing you there!


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