One of the fun things about a hackathon is the chance to get everyone together in a room and just talk about crazy ideas you might try at some point in the future.
One of the advantage that a certain competing virtualization technology has over Xen is that you don’t have to reboot to start using it. It’s not that big of a thing, but if you just want to play around with VMs, the additional step of rebooting and probably having to muck about with a grub entry makes it pretty certain that casual users will prefer our competition.
Wouldn’t it be great, someone said, if you could just do “insmod xen” in a running kernel, and have it hoist up the kernel (which is currently running on bare metal), put Xen underneath, and make the currently running kernel into domain 0?
The idea sounds pretty crazy at first, but after some examination, it’s actually quite do-able. In fact, there’s precedent: Windows 2008, apparently, does that when booting into Hyper-V. It may involve a certain amount of switching from bare metal code to PV code; but there’s precedent for that too, in the form of SMP alternatives.
One thing that it would depend upon is another project we’ve been kicking around for a year or so now, that being running dom0 in an HVM container. That would greatly reduce the amount of PVOPS necessary to run Linux as dom0, making the “hoist” a lot cleaner.
We have a lot of work to do before this can become a priority, but it’s a project that’s attractive enough that I’m sure someone will pick it up in due time, at which point there’s no technical reason that Xen can’t be as convenient for casual users to being using as any other virtualization technology out there.
Xen Hackathon crazy idea: insmod xen
