Xen

Xen

Status

Introduction

Xen is a virtual machine monitor that supports running multiple Linux instances in parallel on either a single machine or multiple machines. In order to make Xen more accessible to the Ubuntu community, we would like to provide a ready-to-run Xen environment within Ubuntu.

Rationale

Xen and similar virtualisation applications are frequently requested by users. Xen is probably the solution with the minimum overhead of all the different techniques. A number of both external and internal projects will be interested in virtual machines, both for separation of execution domains and migration as well as security. Xen's security comes from a full separation of execution domains. Examples for internal usage are [AutomatedTesting] and increased security for automated software builds.

Scope and Use Cases

  • James doesn't want different services to see each other and would like to migrate services from one host to another with a minimum of effort.
  • Lamont wants to build random software off the Internet and publish it on a web page. Since this is untrusted software, he prefers it to not be able to touch the base system.

  • LinuxHosting wants to be able to offer virtual hosting without the complexity of blade servers and without paying the cost of additional rack space. Qemu and UML have a fair amount of overhead.

Implementation Plan

  • Create a new xen kernel source package to build the xen0 and xenU kernels. The xen0 is the kernel used in execution domain 0 while xenU is the kernel used for each execution domain. The package will stay in universe until it has received adequate testing to be merged with the linux-image-* proper.
  • Sync xen-utils from Debian experimental (might need updating)

Data Preservation and Migration

  • N/A

Packages Affected

  • xen-utils

  • linux-* (if/when merged)

User Interface Requirements

The execution domain configuration file is a python program, so the user will at least initially have to have a fair knowledge of python.

Outstanding Issues

  • Xen is brittle and very sensitive to the applied patches and hardware
  • Not fully portable yet; amd64 port is coming but not ready yet. Other architectures such as PowerPC and Sparc have no support for Xen.
  • At the moment, creating a new non-trivial execution is very hard.

UDU BOF Agenda

UDU Pre-Work

UbuntuDownUnder/BOFs/Xen (last edited 2008-08-06 16:28:36 by localhost)