Xen Hypervisor Update 2011

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The Linux Foundation

Technology

Xen Hypervisor Update
Keir Fraser - xen.org

Sponsored by:

&

Release plans ®

• Current stable releases: 4.0.2 and 4.1.1
• New point releases planned for later this month
• Ongoing strategy:
– Maintain two stable branches at a time
– Quarterly releases from stable branches
– Around nine months between major releases
– Xen 4.2 likely in early 2012

2
8/11/2011

HVM Device Model & BIOS
®

• Xen support is now in upstream Qemu
– Mapcache, VGA dirty bits, unplug protocol, …
– New development branch announced on xenbits
– We can now take advantage of new or upcoming Qemu
upstream features: PCI Express, USB EHCI/XHCI, Firewire
• Associated work to extend our virtual BIOS support
– SeaBIOS is legacy BIOS supported by upstream Qemu
– OVMF (EDK II / Tianocore) for UEFI support
• Faster Windows boot
• Supported by Mac OS X out of the box
• May be needed for platform certification in the future

3

Linux 3.0
®

• Dom0 support is now in upstream Linux
• Just in time for Linux 3.0 !
• This will naturally trickle down to become a common
distro feature, with no need for maintaining an old
kernel version, or porting the old dom0 patchset
• Everything needed to run a full Xen system is in Linux
3.0
• Thanks to Jeremy, Konrad, and many others

4

Guest performance
®

• X86/64 PV guests suffer poor syscall performance
• There are hardware features that optimise guest
performance that are only available to HVM guests
• Solution: optionally run PV guests in a lightweight
HVM container
• Mukesh Rathor (Oracle) has a prototype running
with promising results
• Expected to be ready for inclusion well in time for
Xen 4.2.

5

Nested virtualization
®

• Allows a fully-virtualized (HVM) guest to itself detect
and use the HVM processor features
– VMX-on-VMX (Intel); SVM-on-SVM (AMD)
• Uses:
– Client virtualization experience
– Embedded hypervisor
– Hypervisor testing 
• Recently applied to 4.2 development branch
– Needs more testing (please!)

6

Toolstack (libxenlight)
®

• Libxenlight now used by other clients than XL
– Libvirt
– (In progress) xapi (XCP)
• API improvements are being made to make
libxenlight better suit a wider range of client users
• Better Qemu integration: QMP support
– Will be used to issue run-time commands to Qemu
– Patches recently posted to xen-devel

7

ARM
®

• Samsung published an ARM port in 2008
• Working to sync with Xen development tree
– And get ARM support integrated with upstream
• Initial support for PV guests
• HVM support also in the pipeline
– Using new virtualisation extensions in Cortex A15
• Hopefully this will be integrated for Xen 4.2

8

Other stuff
®

• Remus – replication & failover for high availability
– Shriram Rajagopalan @ UBC is kicking it into shape
• Guest-memory automatic sharing and paging
– In preview since 4.0
– Various folks working on fixing bugs and tricky corner cases
• RAS
– Ongoing improvements to graceful handling of hardware
faults

9

Managing development
®

• Use the developer mailing lists
– xen-devel@lists.xensource.com
– Requests for comments
– Announcements of dev plans
– Patches posted for comment, review and checkin
• Use the wiki
– http://wiki.xen.org/

10

What's hot

The XenServer virtualization platform is used by well over 100,000 organizations to fulfill their IT objectives. Common scenarios include traditional server virtualization such as that found with VMware vSphere, delivery of large scale cloud services via Apache CloudStack or OpenStack, and as a platform for high performance desktop virtualization through XenDesktop. These use cases all have requirements of scale and manageability which imply solid deployments. The content in this deck was presented in workshop form at FOSSETCON in 2015. Much of the information contained will work for any XenServer version, but XenServer 6.5 was covered. The audience was assumed to have some familiarity with virtualization concepts, but no assumptions about XenServer was made. Core concepts covered included; storage design, network design and operations, scalability and failure domains, as well as core features such as virtualized graphics.

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In a traditional Xen configuration domain 0 is used for a large number of different functions including running the toolstack(s), backends for network and disk I/O, running the QEMU device model instances, driving the physical devices in the system, handling guest console/framebuffer I/O and miscellaneous monitoring and management functions. Having all these functions in one domain produces a complex environment which is susceptible to shared fate on the failure of any one function, has complex interactions between functions (including resource contention) which makes it difficult to predict performance, and has limited flexibility (such as requiring the same kernel for all device drivers). ""Domain 0 disaggregation"" has been discussed for some time as a way to break out domain 0's functions into separate domains. Doing this enables each domain to be tailored to its function such as using a different kernel or operating system to drive different physical devices. Splitting functions into separate domains removes some of the unintentional interactions such as in-domain resource contention and reduces the system impact of the failure of a single function such as a device driver crash. Although domain 0 disaggregation is not new it is seldom used in practise and much of its use is focussed on providing enhanced security. Citrix XenServer will be moving towards a disaggregated domain 0 in order to provide better security, scalability, performance, reliability, supportability and flexibility. This talk will describe XenServer's “Windsor” architecture and explain how it will provide the above benefits to customers and users. We will present an overview of the architecture and some early experimental measurements showing the benefits.

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