Well, the mainline kernel just hit 2.6.27-rc1, so it's time for an update about what's new with Xen. I'm trying to aim this at both the user and developer audiences, so bear with me if I seem to be waffling about something irrelevant.
2.6.26 was mostly a bugfix update compared with 2.6.25, with a few small issues fixed up. Feature-wise, it supports 32-bit domU with the core devices needed to make it work (netfront, blockfront, console). It also has xen-pvfb support, which means you can run the standard X server without needing to set up Xvnc. I don't know of any bugs in 2.6.26, so I'd recommend you try it out for all your 32-bit domU needs. It has had fairly wide exposure in Fedora kernels, so I'd rank its stability as fairly high. If you're migrating from 2.6.18-xen, then there'll be a few things you need to pay attention to. http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps should help, but if it doesn't, please either fix it and/or ask! 2.6.27 will be a much more interesting release. It has two major feature additions: save/restore/migrate (including checkpoint and live migration), and x86-64 support. In keeping with the overall unification of i386 and x86-64 code in the kernel, the 32- and 64-bit Xen code is largely shared, so they have feature parity. The Xen support seems fairly stable in linux-2.6.git, but the kernel is still at -rc1, so lots of other things will tend to break. I encourage you to try it out if you're comfortable with what's still a fairly high rate of change. My current patch stack is pretty much empty - everything has been merged into linux-2.6.git - so it makes a good base for any changes you may have Now that Xen can directly boot a bzImage format kernel, distros have a lot of flexibilty in how they package Xen. A single grub.conf entry can be used to boot either a native kernel (via normal grub), or a paravirtualized Xen kernel (via pygrub), without modification. Fedora 9's kernel-xen package has been based on the mainline kernel from the outset, but it is still packaged as a separate kernel. kernel-xen has been dropped from rawhide (what will become Fedora 10), and all Xen support - both 32 and 64 bit - has been rolled into the main kernel package. So, what's next? The obvious big piece of missing functionality is dom0 support. That will be my focus in this next kernel development window, and I hope we'll have it merged into 2.6.28. Some roadblock may appear which prevents this (kernel development is always a bit uncertain), but that's the current plan. We're planning on setting up a xen.git on xen.org somewhere. We still need to work out the precise details, but my expectation is that will become the place where dom0 work continues, and I also hope that other Xen developers will start using it as the base for their own Xen work. Expect to see some more concrete details over the next week or so. What can I do? I'm glad you asked. Here's my current TODO list. These are mostly fairly small-scale projects which just need some attention. I'd love people to adopt things from this list. x86-64: SMP broken with CONFIG_PREEMPT It crashes early after bringing up a second CPU when preempt is enabled. I think it's failing to set up the CPU topology properly, and leaving something uninitialized. The desired topology is the simplest possible - one core per package, no SMT/HT, no multicore, no shared caches. It should be simple to set up. irq balancing causes lockups Using irq balancing causes the kernel to lock up after a while. It looks like it's losing interrupts. It's probably dropping interrupts if you migrate an irq beween vcpus while an event is pending. Shouldn't be too hard to fix. (In the meantime, the workaround is to make sure that you don't enable in-kernel irq balancing, and you don't run irqbalanced.) block device hotplug Hotplugging devices should work already, but I haven't really tested it. Need to make sure that both the in-kernel driver stuff works properly, and that udev events are raised properly, scripts run, device nodes added - and conversely for unplug. Also, a modular xen-blockfront.ko should be unloadable. net device hotplug Similar to block devices, but with a slight extra complication. If the driver has outstanding granted pages, then the module can't be immediately unloaded, because you can't free the pages if dom0 has a reference to them. My thought is to add a simple kernel thread which takes ownership of unwanted granted pages: it would periodically try to ungrant them, and if successful, free the page. That means that netfront could hand ownership of those pages over to that thread, and unload immediately. Performance measurement and tuning By design, the paravirt-ops-based Xen implementation should have high performance. It uses batching where-ever possible, late pin/early unpin, and all the other performance tricks available to a Xen kernel. However, my emphasis has been on correctness and features, so I have not extensively benchmarked or performance tuned the code. There's plenty of scope for measuring both synthetic and real-world benchmarks (ideally, applications you really care about), and try to work out how things can be tuned. One thing that has already come to light is a general regression in context switch time compared to 2.6.18.8-xen. It's unclear where it's coming from; a close look at the actual context switch code itself shows that it should perform the same as 2.6.18-xen (same number of hypercalls performed, for example). This would be an excellent opportunity to become familiar with Xen's tracing and performance measurement tools... Balloon driver The current in-kernel balloon driver only supports shrinking and regrowing a domain up to its original size. There's no support for growing a domain beyond that. My plan is to use hotplug memory to add new memory to the system. I have some prototype code to do this, which works OK, but the hotplug memory subsystem needs some modifications to really deal with the kinds of incremental memory increases that we need for ballooning (it assumes that you're actually plugging in physical DIMMs). The other area which needs attention is some sanity checking when deflating a domain, to prevent killing the domain by stealing too much memory. 2.6.18-xen uses a simple static minimum memory heuristic based on the original size of the domain. This helps, but doesn't really prevent over-shrinking a domain which is already under memory pressure. A better approach might be to register a shrinker callback, which means that the balloon driver can see how much memory pressure the system is under by looking getting feedback from it. A more advanced project is to modify the kernel VM subsystem to measure refault distance, which is how long a page is evicted before being faulted back in again. That measurement can tell you how much more memory you need to add to a domain in order to get the fault rate below a given rate. gdb gives bad info in a 64-bit domain For some reason, gdb doesn't work properly. If you set a breakpoint, the program will stop as expected, but the register state will be wrong. Other users of the ptrace syscall, such as strace, seem to get good results, so I'm not sure what's going on here. It might be a simple fix, or symptomatic of a more serious problem. But it needs investigation first. My Pet Project What's missing? What do you depend on? What's needed before you can use mainline Xen as your sole Xen kernel? Thanks, J _______________________________________________ Virtualization mailing list Virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/virtualization
