xen/README

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University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
31 Aug 2003

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/netos/xen

About the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor
=====================================

"Xen" is a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) developed by the Systems
Research Group of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, as
part of the UK-EPSRC funded XenoServers project.

The XenoServers project aims to provide a "public infrastructure for
global distributed computing", and Xen plays a key part in that,
allowing us to efficiently partition a single machine to enable
multiple independent clients to run their operating systems and
applications in an environment providing protection, resource
isolation and accounting.  The project web page contains further
information along with pointers to papers and technical reports:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/xeno

Xen has since grown into a project in its own right, enabling us to
investigate interesting research issues regarding the best techniques
for virtualizing resources such as the CPU, memory, disk and network.
The project has been bolstered by support from Intel Research
Cambridge, who are now working closely with us. We're also in receipt
of support from Microsoft Research Cambridge to port Windows XP to 
run on Xen.

Xen enables multiple operating system images to execute concurrently 
on the same hardware with very low performance overhead --- much lower
than commercial offerings for the same x86 platform.

This is achieved by requiring OSs to be specifically ported to run on
Xen, rather than allowing unmodified OS images to be used. Crucially,
only the OS needs to be changed -- all of the user-level application
binaries, libraries etc can run unmodified. Hence the modified OS
kernel can typically just be dropped into any existing OS distribution
or installation.

Xen currently runs on the x86 architecture, but could in principle be
ported to others. In fact, it would have been rather easier to write
Xen for pretty much any other architecture as x86 is particularly 
tricky to handle. A good description of Xen's design, implementation 
and performance is contained in our October 2003 SOSP paper, available
at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/netos/papers/2003-xensosp.pdf

We have been working on porting 3 different operating systems to run
on Xen: Linux 2.4, Windows XP, and NetBSD.

The Linux 2.4 port (currently Linux 2.4.22) works very well -- we
regularly use it to host complex applications such as PostgreSQL,
Apache, BK servers etc. It runs every user-space applications we've
tried.  We refer to our version of Linux ported to run on Xen as
"XenoLinux", although really it's just standard Linux ported to a new
virtual CPU architecture that we call xeno-x86 (abbreviated to just
"xeno").

Unfortunately, the NetBSD port has stalled due to lack of man
power. We believe most of the hard stuff has already been done, and
are hoping to get the ball rolling again soon. In hindsight, a FreeBSD
4 port might have been more useful to the community. Any volunteers? :-)

The Windows XP port is nearly finished. It's running user space
applications and is generally in pretty good shape thanks to some hard
work by the team over the summer.  Of course, there are issues with
releasing this code to others.  We should be able to release the
source and binaries to anyone that has signed the Microsoft academic
source license, which these days has very reasonable terms. We are in
discussions with Microsoft about the possibility of being able to make
binary releases to a larger user community. Obviously, there are
issues with product activation in this environment which need to be 
thought through.

So, for the moment, you only get to run multiple copies of Linux on
Xen, but we hope this will change before too long.  Even running
multiple copies of the same OS can be very useful, as it provides a
means of containing faults to one OS image, and also for providing
performance isolation between the various OS, enabling you to either
restrict, or reserve resources for, particular VM instances.

It's also useful for development -- each version of Linux can have
different patches applied, enabling different kernels to be tried
out. For example, the "vservers" patch used by PlanetLab applies
cleanly to our ported version of Linux.

We've successfully booted over 128 copies of Linux on the same machine
(a dual CPU hyperthreaded Xeon box) but we imagine that it would be
more normal to use some smaller number, perhaps 10-20.



Hardware support
================

Xen is intended to be run on server-class machines, and the current
list of supported hardware very much reflects this, avoiding the need
for us to write drivers for "legacy" hardware.

Xen requires a "P6" or newer processor (e.g. Pentium Pro, Celeron,
Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV, Xeon, AMD Athlon, AMD Duron).
Multiprocessor machines are supported, and we also have basic support
for HyperThreading (SMT), although this remains a topic for ongoing
research. We're also looking at an AMD x86_64 port (though it should
run on Opterons in 32-bit mode just fine).

Xen can currently use up to 4GB of memory. It's possible for x86
machines to address more than that (64GB), but it requires using a
different page table format (3-level rather than 2-level) that we
currently don't support. Adding 3-level PAE support wouldn't be
difficult, but we'd also need to add support to all the guest
OSs. Volunteers welcome!

We currently support a relatively modern set of network cards: Intel
e1000, Broadcom BCM 57xx (tg3), 3COM 3c905 (3c59x). Adding support for
other NICs that support hardware DMA scatter/gather from half-word
aligned addresses is relatively straightforward, by porting the
equivalent Linux driver. Drivers for a number of other older cards
have recently been added [pcnet32, e100, tulip], but are untested and
not recommended.


Building Xen and XenoLinux
==========================

Take a look at the tools/misc/xen-clone script in the BK repository,
which will 'bk clone' the live master tree, and then set about 
building everything. The build procedure for xenolinux is slightly 
complicated as its done by running the 'mkbuildtree' script over
a pristine Linux tree to turn it into a xenolinux tree by adding the
'xeno' architecture.

The public master BK repository lives at:   bk://xen.bkbits.net/xeno.bk



Ian Pratt
9 Sep 2003