To Xen customers: If you are using Xen, either as a direct download from the Xen.org site or from a partner who is leveraging Xen as their virtualization engine (e.g. Oracle, RedHat, Novell, Sun, etc) they I am looking for you. The Xen development community is actively looking
Ian Pratt and I were discussing the fact that open source Xen has no “mascot” like other open source projects and we joked about some possibilities (see my list below). I am curious to see what ideas the community has for a “mascot”. NOTE – this is just for fun and
The Xen Summit Tokyo (Asia) registration system is now active at https://www.regonline.com/xsasia08. For people who speak Japanese, please visit this site to assist with registration: http://xen.org/xensummit/How_to_register_Japanese.html. If you have any problems with the registration system, please contact me.
For those of you interested in the next release of Xen, a new list of features is being compiled at http://www.xen.org/download/roadmap.html. If you have any ideas you would like added, please email myself or xen-devel so the information can be added to this roadmap
The official Xen.org Press Release announcing Xen 3.3 has been posted here. There are many partner quotes in the release from Oracle, Novell, Intel, AMD, Sun, IBM, Fujitsu, Samsung, Neocleus, Citrix, SignaCert, etc and I encourage everyone in the community to take a look. I just got a
From Samuel Thibault: When having a look at how much CPU time is used when an HVM guest is idle, one can notice that the ioemu process used to permanently take something like 7%. This is because ioemu used to keep checking the content of the HVM video RAM for
From Samuel Thibault: The traditional way to configure a PV guest is to write in the configuration file the path to the kernel/initrd to be loaded. However, logically enough, these should be on the PV guest disk image, to allow them to be managed by the distribution installed
From Samuel Thibault: To provide HVM domains with virtual hardware, Xen uses a modified version of qemu, ioemu. It used to run in dom0 as a root process, since it needs to directly access disks and tap network. That poses both a problem of security, as the qemu
From Samuel Thibault: Domain 0 running a lot of components like physical device drivers, the domain builder, ioemu device models, PyGRUB, etc. has been worrisome from a security point of view, particularly since most of them run as root, and thus breaches there would potentially be disastrous. It also
Shadow 3 is the next step in the evolution of the shadow pagetable code. By making the shadow pagetables behave more like a TLB, we take advantage of guest operating system TLB behavior to reduce and coalesce the number of guest pagetable changes that the hypervisor has to translate
I am currently working on the Xen.org Community Plans for 2009 Xen Summits and I wanted to share my thoughts with the community to get feedback on my ideas. In the past, Xen Summits have been held every 9 months with the majority of them being in North America.
From Dan Magenheimer at Oracle: Memory overcommit provides the ability for the sum of the physical memory allocated to all active domains to exceed the total physical memory on the system. For example, if your machine has 4GB of RAM and you want to run as many 1GB domains