Over the past few months we have been working on improving the API for the libxl library. libxl is to become the base layer for all Xen toolstacks. We intend the version of libxl in Xen 4.2 to have a stable interface, with which we will maintain backward compatibility
A few months ago we started developing the new Xen.org website. It’s time for an update! Most of the framework and look & feel are now in place. The main outstanding tasks are to migrate content, update the site content where updates are needed, to put the finishing
Where were we? So, here it is what we said up to now. Basically: 1. NUMA is becoming increasingly common; 2. properly dealing with NUMA is important for performance; 3. one can tweak Xen for NUMA, but it would be nice for that to happen automagically! So, let’s tackle
This post written collaboratively by Attilio Rao and George Dunlap Operating systems are generally written assuming that they are in direct control of the hardware. So when we run operating systems in virtual machines, where they share the hardware with other operating systems, this can sometimes cause problems. One of
Canonical’s release of Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS now includes support for the Xen Hypervisor (version 4.1.2), Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) packages and XCP OpenStack plug-ins. The inclusion of the Xen Cloud Platform packages into Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS makes Xen more easily accessible to Ubuntu
If you are upgrading domain 0 Linux kernel from a non-pvops (classic, 2.6.18/2.6.32/etc.) kernel to a pvops one (3.0 or later), you may find that the amount of free memory inside dom0 has decreased significantly. This is because of changes in the
NUMA? What’s NUMA? Having to deal with a Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) machine is becoming more and more common. This is true no matter whether you are part of an engineering research center with access to one of the first Intel SCC-based machines, a virtual machine hosting provider with
A quick round-up of Xen events in May and an update on Xen Summit in August: for more information see the Xen Events page. Xen @ Ubuntu Developer Summit, May 7-11, Oakland, CA The Xen and XCP teams will be participating in the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, CA. The agenda
Among the more unique features of Xen 4.2 is a feature called cpupools, designed and implemented by Jürgen Groß at Fujitsu. At its core it’s a simple idea, but one that allows it to be a flexible and powerful solution to a number of different problems. The
We have another Xen document day come up next Monday. Xen Document Days are for people who care about Xen Documentation and want to improve it. We introduced Documentation Days, because working on documentation in parallel with like minded-people, is just more fun than working alone! Everybody who can contribute
On March 18th, Linux 3.3 was released and it featured a number of interesting Xen related features. * Re-engineered how tools can perform hypercalls – by using a standard interface (/dev/xen/privcmd instead of using /proc/xen/privcmd) * Backends (netback, blkback) can now function in HVM mode. This means that
Fedora is planning a number of test days as part of their release cycle, including a Virtualization Test Day on April 12th (this Thursday). Information about the virtualization test day can be found here. We will have some people hanging out on IRC at #fedora-test-day and you can also get