Users manual

Xen v2.0 for x86

Xen is Copyright (c) 2002-2004, The Xen Team University of Cambridge, UK

DISCLAIMER: This documentation is currently under active development and as such there may be mistakes and omissions watch out for these and please report any you nd to the developers mailing list. Contributions of material, suggestions and corrections are welcome.

Contents
I Introduction and Tutorial
1 Introduction 1.1 Structure of a Xen-Based System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Hardware Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Installation 2.1 Prerequisites . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Installing from Binary Tarball . . 2.3 Installing from Source . . . . . . 2.3.1 Obtaining the Source . . . 2.3.2 Building from Source . . . 2.3.3 Custom XenLinux Builds 2.3.4 Installing the Binaries . . 2.4 Conguration . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.1 GRUB Conguration . . . 2.4.2 Serial Console (optional) . 2.4.3 TLS Libraries . . . . . . . 2.5 Booting Xen . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3 Starting Additional Domains 3.1 Creating a Domain Conguration File . . . 3.2 Booting the Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Example: ttylinux . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Starting / Stopping Domains Automatically 4 Domain Management Tools 4.1 Command-line Management . . . . . . 4.1.1 Basic Management Commands . 4.1.2 xm list . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Domain Save and Restore . . . . . . . . 4.3 Live Migration . . . . . . . . . . . . . i

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4.4

Managing Domain Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.1 Setting memory footprints from dom0 . . . . . . 4.4.2 Setting memory footprints from within a domain 4.4.3 Setting memory limits . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5 Domain Filesystem Storage 5.1 Exporting Physical Devices as VBDs . 5.2 Using File-backed VBDs . . . . . . . 5.3 Using LVM-backed VBDs . . . . . . 5.4 Using NFS Root . . . . . . . . . . . .

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II User Reference Documentation

6 Control Software 6.1 Xend (node control daemon) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Xm (command line interface) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Xensv (web control interface) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Domain Conguration 7.1 Conguration Files . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Network Conguration . . . . . . . . 7.2.1 Xen virtual network topology 7.2.2 Xen networking scripts . . . . 7.3 Driver Domain Conguration . . . . . 7.4 Scheduler Conguration . . . . . . . 7.4.1 Borrowed Virtual Time . . . . 7.4.2 Atropos . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.3 Round Robin . . . . . . . . . 8 Build, Boot and Debug options 8.1 Xen Build Options . . . . 8.2 Xen Boot Options . . . . . 8.3 XenLinux Boot Options . . 8.4 Debugging . . . . . . . . .

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9 Further Support 9.1 Other Documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Online References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 Mailing Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Installing Xen / XenLinux on Debian ii

B Installing Xen / XenLinux on Redhat or Fedora Core C Glossary of Terms

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Part I

Introduction and Tutorial

Chapter 1

Introduction
Xen is a paravirtualising virtual machine monitor (VMM), or hypervisor, for the x86 processor architecture. Xen can securely execute multiple virtual machines on a single physical system with close-to-native performance. The virtual machine technology facilitates enterprise-grade functionality, including: Virtual machines with performance close to native hardware. Live migration of running virtual machines between physical hosts.

Paravirtualisation permits very high performance virtualisation, even on architectures like x86 that are traditionally very hard to virtualise. The drawback of this approach is that it requires operating systems to be ported to run on Xen. Porting an OS to run on Xen is similar to supporting a new hardware platform, however the process is simplied because the paravirtual machine architecture is very similar to the underlying native hardware. Even though operating system kernels must explicitly support Xen, a key feature is that user space applications and libraries do not require modication. Xen support is available for increasingly many operating systems: right now, Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6 and NetBSD are available for Xen 2.0. A FreeBSD port is undergoing testing and will be incorporated into the release soon. Other OS ports, including Plan 9, are in progress. We hope that that arch-xen patches will be incorporated into the mainstream releases of these operating systems in due course (as has already happened for NetBSD). Possible usage scenarios for Xen include: Kernel development. Test and debug kernel modications in a sandboxed virtual machine no need for a separate test machine. Multiple OS congurations. Run multiple operating systems simultaneously, for instance for compatibility or QA purposes. 3

Sandboxed, restartable device drivers.

Excellent hardware support (supports most Linux device drivers).

Server consolidation. Move multiple servers onto a single physical host with performance and fault isolation provided at virtual machine boundaries. Cluster computing. Management at VM granularity provides more exibility than separately managing each physical host, but better control and isolation than single-system image solutions, particularly by using live migration for load balancing. Hardware support for custom OSes. Allow development of new OSes while beneting from the wide-ranging hardware support of existing OSes such as Linux.

1.1 Structure of a Xen-Based System

A Xen system has multiple layers, the lowest and most privileged of which is Xen itself. Xen in turn may host multiple guest operating systems, each of which is executed within a secure virtual machine (in Xen terminology, a domain). Domains are scheduled by Xen to make effective use of the available physical CPUs. Each guest OS manages its own applications, which includes responsibility for scheduling each application within the time allotted to the VM by Xen. The rst domain, domain 0, is created automatically when the system boots and has special management privileges. Domain 0 builds other domains and manages their virtual devices. It also performs administrative tasks such as suspending, resuming and migrating other virtual machines. Within domain 0, a process called xend runs to manage the system. Xend is responsible for managing virtual machines and providing access to their consoles. Commands are issued to xend over an HTTP interface, either from a command-line tool or from a web browser.

1.2 Hardware Support

Xen currently runs only on the x86 architecture, requiring 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. A port specically for x86/64 is in progress, although Xen already runs on such systems in 32bit legacy mode. In addition a port to the IA64 architecture is approaching completion. We hope to add other architectures such as PPC and ARM in due course. Xen can currently use up to 4GB of memory. It is possible for x86 machines to address up to 64GB of physical memory but there are no current plans to support these systems: The x86/64 port is the planned route to supporting larger memory sizes. Xen ofoads most of the hardware support issues to the guest OS running in Domain 0. 4

Xen itself contains only the code required to detect and start secondary processors, set up interrupt routing, and perform PCI bus enumeration. Device drivers run within a privileged guest OS rather than within Xen itself. This approach provides compatibility with the majority of device hardware supported by Linux. The default XenLinux build contains support for relatively modern server-class network and disk hardware, but you can add support for other hardware by conguring your XenLinux kernel in the normal way.

1.3 History
Xen was originally developed by the Systems Research Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory as part of the XenoServers project, funded by the UK-EPSRC. XenoServers aim to provide a public infrastructure for global distributed computing, and Xen plays a key part in that, allowing us to efciently 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 fully-edged project in its own right, enabling us to investigate interesting research issues regarding the best techniques for virtualising resources such as the CPU, memory, disk and network. The project has been bolstered by support from Intel Research Cambridge, and HP Labs, who are now working closely with us. Xen was rst described in a paper presented at SOSP in 2003 1 , and the rst public release (1.0) was made that October. Since then, Xen has signicantly matured and is now used in production scenarios on many sites. Xen 2.0 features greatly enhanced hardware support, conguration exibility, usability and a larger complement of supported operating systems. This latest release takes Xen a step closer to becoming the denitive open source solution for virtualisation.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/netos/papers/2003-xensosp.pdf

Chapter 2

Installation
The Xen distribution includes three main components: Xen itself, ports of Linux 2.4 and 2.6 and NetBSD to run on Xen, and the user-space tools required to manage a Xen-based system. This chapter describes how to install the Xen 2.0 distribution from source. Alternatively, there may be pre-built packages available as part of your operating system distribution.

2.1 Prerequisites
The following is a full list of prerequisites. Items marked are required by the xend control tools, and hence required if you want to run more than one virtual machine; items marked are only required if you wish to build from source.

A working Linux distribution using the GRUB bootloader and running on a P6class (or newer) CPU. The Linux bridge-utils1 (e.g., /sbin/brctl) The iproute2 package.

An installation of Twisted v1.3 or above2 . There may be a binary package available for your distribution; alternatively it can be installed by running make install-twisted in the root of the Xen source tree. Development installation of libcurl (e.g., libcurl-devel) Build tools (gcc v3.2.x or v3.3.x, binutils, GNU make).

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Available from http://bridge.sourceforge.net Available from http://www.twistedmatrix.com

A L TEXand transg are required to build the documentation.

Development installation of Python v2.2 or later (e.g., python-dev).

Development installation of zlib (e.g., zlib-dev).

Once you have satised the relevant prerequisites, you can now install either a binary or source distribution of Xen.

2.2 Installing from Binary Tarball

Pre-built tarballs are available for download from the Xen download page http://xen.sf.net Once youve downloaded the tarball, simply unpack and install: # tar zxvf xen-2.0-install.tgz # cd xen-2.0-install # sh ./install.sh Once youve installed the binaries you need to congure your system as described in Section 2.4.

2.3 Installing from Source

This section describes how to obtain, build, and install Xen from source.

2.3.1

Obtaining the Source

The Xen source tree is available as either a compressed source tar ball or as a clone of our master BitKeeper repository. Obtaining the Source Tarball Stable versions (and daily snapshots) of the Xen source tree are available as compressed tarballs from the Xen download page http://xen.sf.net Using BitKeeper If you wish to install Xen from a clone of our latest BitKeeper repository then you will need to install the BitKeeper tools. Download instructions for BitKeeper can be obtained by lling out the form at: http://www.bitmover.com/cgi-bin/download.cgi The public master BK repository for the 2.0 release lives at: bk://xen.bkbits.net/xen-2.0.bk You can use BitKeeper to download it and keep it updated with the latest features and xes. Change to the directory in which you want to put the source code, then run: 8

# bk clone bk://xen.bkbits.net/xen-2.0.bk Under your current directory, a new directory named xen-2.0.bk has been created, which contains all the source code for Xen, the OS ports, and the control tools. You can update your repository with the latest changes at any time by running: # cd xen-2.0.bk # to change into the local repository # bk pull # to update the repository

2.3.2

Building from Source

The top-level Xen Makele includes a target world that will do the following: Build Xen Build the control tools, including xend

Download (if necessary) and unpack the Linux 2.6 source code, and patch it for use with Xen Build a Linux kernel to use in domain 0 and a smaller unprivileged kernel, which can optionally be used for unprivileged virtual machines. After the build has completed you should have a top-level directory called dist/ in which all resulting targets will be placed; of particular interest are the two kernels XenLinux kernel images, one with a -xen0 extension which contains hardware device drivers and drivers for Xens virtual devices, and one with a -xenU extension that just contains the virtual ones. These are found in dist/install/boot/ along with the image for Xen itself and the conguration les used during the build. The NetBSD port can be built using: # make netbsd20 NetBSD port is built using a snapshot of the netbsd-2-0 cvs branch. The snapshot is downloaded as part of the build process, if it is not yet present in the NETBSD SRC PATH search path. The build process also downloads a toolchain which includes all the tools necessary to build the NetBSD kernel under Linux. To customize further the set of kernels built you need to edit the top-level Makele. Look for the line: KERNELS ?= mk.linux-2.6-xen0 mk.linux-2.6-xenU You can edit this line to include any set of operating system kernels which have congurations in the top-level buildconfigs/ directory, for example mk.linux-2.4xenU to build a Linux 2.4 kernel containing only virtual device drivers.

2.3.3

Custom XenLinux Builds

If you wish to build a customized XenLinux kernel (e.g. to support additional devices or enable distribution-required features), you can use the standard Linux conguration mechanisms, specifying that the architecture being built for is xen, e.g: # # # # cd linux-2.6.11-xen0 make ARCH=xen xconfig cd .. make

You can also copy an existing Linux conguration (.config) into linux-2.6.11xen0 and execute: # make ARCH=xen oldconfig You may be prompted with some Xen-specic options; we advise accepting the defaults for these options. Note that the only difference between the two types of Linux kernel that are built is the conguration le used for each. The U sufxed (unprivileged) versions dont contain any of the physical hardware device drivers, leading to a 30% reduction in size; hence you may prefer these for your non-privileged domains. The 0 sufxed privileged versions can be used to boot the system, as well as in driver domains and unprivileged domains.

2.3.4

Installing the Binaries

The les produced by the build process are stored under the dist/install/ directory. To install them in their default locations, do: # make install Alternatively, users with special installation requirements may wish to install them manually by copying the les to their appropriate destinations. The dist/install/boot directory will also contain the cong les used for building the XenLinux kernels, and also versions of Xen and XenLinux kernels that contain debug symbols (xen-syms-2.0.6 and vmlinux-syms-2.6.11.11-xen0) which are essential for interpreting crash dumps. Retain these les as the developers may wish to see them if you post on the mailing list.

2.4 Conguration
Once you have built and installed the Xen distribution, it is simple to prepare the machine for booting and running Xen.

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2.4.1

GRUB Conguration

An entry should be added to grub.conf (often found under /boot/ or /boot/grub/) to allow Xen / XenLinux to boot. This le is sometimes called menu.lst, depending on your distribution. The entry should look something like the following:
title Xen 2.0 / XenLinux 2.6 kernel /boot/xen-2.0.gz dom0_mem=131072 module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6-xen0 root=/dev/sda4 ro console=tty0

The kernel line tells GRUB where to nd Xen itself and what boot parameters should be passed to it (in this case, setting domain 0s memory allocation in kilobytes and the settings for the serial port). For more details on the various Xen boot parameters see Section 8.2. The module line of the conguration describes the location of the XenLinux kernel that Xen should start and the parameters that should be passed to it (these are standard Linux parameters, identifying the root device and specifying it be initially mounted read only and instructing that console output be sent to the screen). Some distributions such as SuSE do not require the ro parameter. If you want to use an initrd, just add another module line to the conguration, as usual:
module /boot/my_initrd.gz

As always when installing a new kernel, it is recommended that you do not delete existing menu options from menu.lst you may want to boot your old Linux kernel in future, particularly if you have problems.

2.4.2

Serial Console (optional)

In order to congure Xen serial console output, it is necessary to add an boot option to your GRUB cong; e.g. replace the above kernel line with:
kernel /boot/xen.gz dom0_mem=131072 com1=115200,8n1

This congures Xen to output on COM1 at 115,200 baud, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit and no parity. Modify these parameters for your set up. One can also congure XenLinux to share the serial console; to achieve this append console=ttyS0 to your module line. If you wish to be able to log in over the XenLinux serial console it is necessary to add a line into /etc/inittab, just as per regular Linux. Simply add the line:
c:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty ttyS0

and you should be able to log in. Note that to successfully log in as root over the serial line will require adding ttyS0 to /etc/securetty in most modern distributions.

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2.4.3

TLS Libraries

Users of the XenLinux 2.6 kernel should disable Thread Local Storage (e.g. by doing a mv /lib/tls /lib/tls.disabled) before attempting to run with a XenLinux kernel3 . You can always reenable it by restoring the directory to its original location (i.e. mv /lib/tls.disabled /lib/tls). The reason for this is that the current TLS implementation uses segmentation in a way that is not permissible under Xen. If TLS is not disabled, an emulation mode is used within Xen which reduces performance substantially. We hope that this issue can be resolved by working with Linux distribution vendors to implement a minor backward-compatible change to the TLS library.

2.5 Booting Xen

It should now be possible to restart the system and use Xen. Reboot as usual but choose the new Xen option when the Grub screen appears. What follows should look much like a conventional Linux boot. The rst portion of the output comes from Xen itself, supplying low level information about itself and the machine it is running on. The following portion of the output comes from XenLinux. You may see some errors during the XenLinux boot. These are not necessarily anything to worry about they may result from kernel conguration differences between your XenLinux kernel and the one you usually use. When the boot completes, you should be able to log into your system as usual. If you are unable to log in to your system running Xen, you should still be able to reboot with your normal Linux kernel.

If you boot without rst disabling TLS, you will get a warning message during the boot process. In this case, simply perform the rename after the machine is up and then run /sbin/ldconfig to make it take effect.

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Chapter 3

Starting Additional Domains

The rst step in creating a new domain is to prepare a root lesystem for it to boot off. Typically, this might be stored in a normal partition, an LVM or other volume manager partition, a disk le or on an NFS server. A simple way to do this is simply to boot from your standard OS install CD and install the distribution into another partition on your hard drive. To start the xend control daemon, type # xend start If you wish the daemon to start automatically, see the instructions in Section 6.1. Once the daemon is running, you can use the xm tool to monitor and maintain the domains running on your system. This chapter provides only a brief tutorial: we provide full details of the xm tool in the next chapter.

3.1 Creating a Domain Conguration File

Before you can start an additional domain, you must create a conguration le. We provide two example les which you can use as a starting point: /etc/xen/xmexample1 is a simple template conguration le for describing a single VM. /etc/xen/xmexample2 le is a template description that is intended to be reused for multiple virtual machines. Setting the value of the vmid variable on the xm command line lls in parts of this template. Copy one of these les and edit it as appropriate. Typical values you may wish to edit include: kernel Set this to the path of the kernel you compiled for use with Xen (e.g. kernel = /boot/vmlinuz-2.6-xenU)

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memory Set this to the size of the domains memory in megabytes (e.g. memory = 64) disk Set the rst entry in this list to calculate the offset of the domains root partition, based on the domain ID. Set the second to the location of /usr if you are sharing it between domains (e.g. disk =
[phy:your hard drive%d,sda1,w % (base partition number + vmid), phy:your usr partition,sda6,r ]

dhcp Uncomment the dhcp variable, so that the domain will receive its IP address from a DHCP server (e.g. dhcp=dhcp) You may also want to edit the vif variable in order to choose the MAC address of the virtual ethernet interface yourself. For example: vif = [mac=00:06:AA:F6:BB:B3] If you do not set this variable, xend will automatically generate a random MAC address from an unused range.

3.2 Booting the Domain

The xm tool provides a variety of commands for managing domains. Use the create command to start new domains. Assuming youve created a conguration le myvmconf based around /etc/xen/xmexample2, to start a domain with virtual machine ID 1 you should type: # xm create -c myvmconf vmid=1 The -c switch causes xm to turn into the domains console after creation. The vmid=1 sets the vmid variable used in the myvmconf le. You should see the console boot messages from the new domain appearing in the terminal in which you typed the command, culminating in a login prompt.

3.3 Example: ttylinux

Ttylinux is a very small Linux distribution, designed to require very few resources. We will use it as a concrete example of how to start a Xen domain. Most users will probably want to install a full-featured distribution once they have mastered the basics 1 . 1. Download and extract the ttylinux disk image from the Files section of the projects SourceForge site (see http://sf.net/projects/xen/). 2. Create a conguration le like the following:
ttylinux is maintained by Pascal Schmidt. You can download source packages from the distributions home page: http://www.minimalinux.org/ttylinux/
1

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kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-2.6-xenU" memory = 64 name = "ttylinux" nics = 1 ip = "1.2.3.4" disk = [file:/path/to/ttylinux/rootfs,sda1,w] root = "/dev/sda1 ro" 3. Now start the domain and connect to its console: xm create configfile -c 4. Login as root, password root.

3.4 Starting / Stopping Domains Automatically

It is possible to have certain domains start automatically at boot time and to have dom0 wait for all running domains to shutdown before it shuts down the system. To specify a domain is to start at boot-time, place its conguration le (or a link to it) under /etc/xen/auto/. A Sys-V style init script for RedHat and LSB-compliant systems is provided and will be automatically copied to /etc/init.d/ during install. You can then enable it in the appropriate way for your distribution. For instance, on RedHat: # chkconfig --add xendomains By default, this will start the boot-time domains in runlevels 3, 4 and 5. You can also use the service command to run this script manually, e.g: # service xendomains start Starts all the domains with cong les under /etc/xen/auto/. # service xendomains stop Shuts down ALL running Xen domains.

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Chapter 4

Domain Management Tools

The previous chapter described a simple example of how to congure and start a domain. This chapter summarises the tools available to manage running domains.

4.1 Command-line Management

Command line management tasks are also performed using the xm tool. For online help for the commands available, type: # xm help You can also type xm help <command> for more information on a given command.

4.1.1

Basic Management Commands

The most important xm commands are: # xm list: Lists all domains running. # xm consoles : Gives information about the domain consoles. # xm console: Opens a console to a domain (e.g. # xm console myVM

4.1.2

xm list

The output of xm list is in rows of the following format: name domid memory cpu state cputime console name The descriptive name of the virtual machine. domid The number of the domain ID this virtual machine is running in. memory Memory size in megabytes. cpu The CPU this domain is running on. 17

state Domain state consists of 5 elds: r running b blocked p paused s shutdown c crashed cputime How much CPU time (in seconds) the domain has used so far. console TCP port accepting connections to the domains console. The xm list command also supports a long output format when the -l switch is used. This outputs the fulls details of the running domains in xends SXP conguration format. For example, suppose the system is running the ttylinux domain as described earlier. The list command should produce output somewhat like the following: # xm list Name Domain-0 ttylinux Id 0 5 Mem(MB) 251 63 CPU 0 0 State r----b--Time(s) 172.2 3.0 Console 9605

Here we can see the details for the ttylinux domain, as well as for domain 0 (which, of course, is always running). Note that the console port for the ttylinux domain is 9605. This can be connected to by TCP using a terminal program (e.g. telnet or, better, xencons). The simplest way to connect is to use the xm console command, specifying the domain name or ID. To connect to the console of the ttylinux domain, we could use any of the following: # xm console ttylinux # xm console 5 # xencons localhost 9605

4.2 Domain Save and Restore

The administrator of a Xen system may suspend a virtual machines current state into a disk le in domain 0, allowing it to be resumed at a later time. The ttylinux domain described earlier can be suspended to disk using the command: # xm save ttylinux ttylinux.xen This will stop the domain named ttylinux and save its current state into a le called ttylinux.xen. To resume execution of this domain, use the xm restore command: 18

# xm restore ttylinux.xen This will restore the state of the domain and restart it. The domain will carry on as before and the console may be reconnected using the xm console command, as above.

4.3 Live Migration

Live migration is used to transfer a domain between physical hosts whilst that domain continues to perform its usual activities from the users perspective, the migration should be imperceptible. To perform a live migration, both hosts must be running Xen / xend and the destination host must have sufcient resources (e.g. memory capacity) to accommodate the domain after the move. Furthermore we currently require both source and destination machines to be on the same L2 subnet. Currently, there is no support for providing automatic remote access to lesystems stored on local disk when a domain is migrated. Administrators should choose an appropriate storage solution (i.e. SAN, NAS, etc.) to ensure that domain lesystems are also available on their destination node. GNBD is a good method for exporting a volume from one machine to another. iSCSI can do a similar job, but is more complex to set up. When a domain migrates, its MAC and IP address move with it, thus it is only possible to migrate VMs within the same layer-2 network and IP subnet. If the destination node is on a different subnet, the administrator would need to manually congure a suitable etherip or IP tunnel in the domain 0 of the remote node. A domain may be migrated using the xm migrate command. To live migrate a domain to another machine, we would use the command: # xm migrate --live mydomain destination.ournetwork.com Without the --live ag, xend simply stops the domain and copies the memory image over to the new node and restarts it. Since domains can have large allocations this can be quite time consuming, even on a Gigabit network. With the --live ag xend attempts to keep the domain running while the migration is in progress, resulting in typical downtimes of just 60300ms. For now it will be necessary to reconnect to the domains console on the new machine using the xm console command. If a migrated domain has any open network connections then they will be preserved, so SSH connections do not have this limitation.

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4.4 Managing Domain Memory

XenLinux domains have the ability to relinquish / reclaim machine memory at the request of the administrator or the user of the domain.

4.4.1

Setting memory footprints from dom0

The machine administrator can request that a domain alter its memory footprint using the xm set-mem command. For instance, we can request that our example ttylinux domain reduce its memory footprint to 32 megabytes. # xm set-mem ttylinux 32 We can now see the result of this in the output of xm list: # xm list Name Domain-0 ttylinux Id 0 5 Mem(MB) 251 31 CPU 0 0 State r----b--Time(s) 172.2 4.3 Console 9605

The domain has responded to the request by returning memory to Xen. We can restore the domain to its original size using the command line: # xm set-mem ttylinux 64

4.4.2

Setting memory footprints from within a domain

The virtual le /proc/xen/balloon allows the owner of a domain to adjust their own memory footprint. Reading the le (e.g. cat /proc/xen/balloon) prints out the current memory footprint of the domain. Writing the le (e.g. echo new target > /proc/xen/balloon) requests that the kernel adjust the domains memory footprint to a new value.

4.4.3

Setting memory limits

Xen associates a memory size limit with each domain. By default, this is the amount of memory the domain is originally started with, preventing the domain from ever growing beyond this size. To permit a domain to grow beyond its original allocation or to prevent a domain youve shrunk from reclaiming the memory it relinquished, use the xm maxmem command.

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Chapter 5

Domain Filesystem Storage

It is possible to directly export any Linux block device in dom0 to another domain, or to export lesystems / devices to virtual machines using standard network protocols (e.g. NBD, iSCSI, NFS, etc). This chapter covers some of the possibilities.

5.1 Exporting Physical Devices as VBDs

One of the simplest congurations is to directly export individual partitions from domain 0 to other domains. To achieve this use the phy: specier in your domain conguration le. For example a line like disk = [phy:hda3,sda1,w] species that the partition /dev/hda3 in domain 0 should be exported read-write to the new domain as /dev/sda1; one could equally well export it as /dev/hda or /dev/sdb5 should one wish. In addition to local disks and partitions, it is possible to export any device that Linux considers to be a disk in the same manner. For example, if you have iSCSI disks or GNBD volumes imported into domain 0 you can export these to other domains using the phy: disk syntax. E.g.: disk = [phy:vg/lvm1,sda2,w] Warning: Block device sharing Block devices should typically only be shared between domains in a readonly fashion otherwise the Linux kernels le systems will get very confused as the le system structure may change underneath them (having the same ext3 partition mounted rw twice is a sure re way to cause irreparable damage)! Xend will attempt to prevent you from doing this by checking that the device is not mounted read-write in domain 0, and hasnt already been exported read-write to another domain. If you want 21

read-write sharing, export the directory to other domains via NFS from domain0 (or use a cluster le system such as GFS or ocfs2).

5.2 Using File-backed VBDs

It is also possible to use a le in Domain 0 as the primary storage for a virtual machine. As well as being convenient, this also has the advantage that the virtual block device will be sparse space will only really be allocated as parts of the le are used. So if a virtual machine uses only half of its disk space then the le really takes up half of the size allocated. For example, to create a 2GB sparse le-backed virtual block device (actually only consumes 1KB of disk): # dd if=/dev/zero of=vm1disk bs=1k seek=2048k count=1 Make a le system in the disk le: # mkfs -t ext3 vm1disk (when the tool asks for conrmation, answer y) Populate the le system e.g. by copying from the current root: # mount -o loop vm1disk /mnt # cp -ax /{root,dev,var,etc,usr,bin,sbin,lib} /mnt # mkdir /mnt/{proc,sys,home,tmp} Tailor the le system by editing /etc/fstab, /etc/hostname, etc (dont forget to edit the les in the mounted le system, instead of your domain 0 lesystem, e.g. you would edit /mnt/etc/fstab instead of /etc/fstab ). For this example put /dev/sda1 to root in fstab. Now unmount (this is important!): # umount /mnt In the conguration le set: disk = [file:/full/path/to/vm1disk,sda1,w] As the virtual machine writes to its disk, the sparse le will be lled in and consume more space up to the original 2GB. Note that le-backed VBDs may not be appropriate for backing I/O-intensive domains. File-backed VBDs are known to experience substantial slowdowns under heavy I/O workloads, due to the I/O handling by the loopback block device used to support le-backed VBDs in dom0. Better I/O performance can be achieved by using either LVM-backed VBDs (Section 5.3) or physical devices as VBDs (Section 5.1). Linux supports a maximum of eight le-backed VBDs across all domains by default.

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This limit can be statically increased by using the max loop module parameter if CONFIG BLK DEV LOOP is compiled as a module in the dom0 kernel, or by using the max loop=n boot option if CONFIG BLK DEV LOOP is compiled directly into the dom0 kernel.

5.3 Using LVM-backed VBDs

A particularly appealing solution is to use LVM volumes as backing for domain lesystems since this allows dynamic growing/shrinking of volumes as well as snapshot and other features. To initialise a partition to support LVM volumes: # pvcreate /dev/sda10 Create a volume group named vg on the physical partition: # vgcreate vg /dev/sda10 Create a logical volume of size 4GB named myvmdisk1: # lvcreate -L4096M -n myvmdisk1 vg You should now see that you have a /dev/vg/myvmdisk1 Make a lesystem, mount it and populate it, e.g.: # # # # mkfs -t ext3 /dev/vg/myvmdisk1 mount /dev/vg/myvmdisk1 /mnt cp -ax / /mnt umount /mnt disk = [ phy:vg/myvmdisk1,sda1,w ] LVM enables you to grow the size of logical volumes, but youll need to resize the corresponding le system to make use of the new space. Some le systems (e.g. ext3) now support on-line resize. See the LVM manuals for more details. You can also use LVM for creating copy-on-write clones of LVM volumes (known as writable persistent snapshots in LVM terminology). This facility is new in Linux 2.6.8, so isnt as stable as one might hope. In particular, using lots of CoW LVM disks consumes a lot of dom0 memory, and error conditions such as running out of disk space are not handled well. Hopefully this will improve in future. To create two copy-on-write clone of the above le system you would use the following commands: # lvcreate -s -L1024M -n myclonedisk1 /dev/vg/myvmdisk1 # lvcreate -s -L1024M -n myclonedisk2 /dev/vg/myvmdisk1

Now congure your VM with the following disk conguration:

23

Each of these can grow to have 1GB of differences from the master volume. You can grow the amount of space for storing the differences using the lvextend command, e.g.: # lvextend +100M /dev/vg/myclonedisk1 Dont let the differences volume ever ll up otherwise LVM gets rather confused. It may be possible to automate the growing process by using dmsetup wait to spot the volume getting full and then issue an lvextend. In principle, it is possible to continue writing to the volume that has been cloned (the changes will not be visible to the clones), but we wouldnt recommend this: have the cloned volume as a pristine le system install that isnt mounted directly by any of the virtual machines.

5.4 Using NFS Root

First, populate a root lesystem in a directory on the server machine. This can be on a distinct physical machine, or simply run within a virtual machine on the same node. Now congure the NFS server to export this lesystem over the network by adding a line to /etc/exports, for instance:
/export/vm1root 1.2.3.4/24 (rw,sync,no_root_squash)

Finally, congure the domain to use NFS root. In addition to the normal variables, you should make sure to set the following values in the domains conguration le:
root = /dev/nfs nfs_server = 2.3.4.5 # substitute IP address of server nfs_root = /path/to/root # path to root FS on the server

The domain will need network access at boot time, so either statically congure an IP address (Using the cong variables ip, netmask, gateway, hostname) or enable DHCP ( dhcp=dhcp). Note that the Linux NFS root implementation is known to have stability problems under high load (this is not a Xen-specic problem), so this conguration may not be appropriate for critical servers.

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Part II

User Reference Documentation

25

Chapter 6

Control Software
The Xen control software includes the xend node control daemon (which must be running), the xm command line tools, and the prototype xensv web interface.

6.1 Xend (node control daemon)

The Xen Daemon (Xend) performs system management functions related to virtual machines. It forms a central point of control for a machine and can be controlled using an HTTP-based protocol. Xend must be running in order to start and manage virtual machines. Xend must be run as root because it needs access to privileged system management functions. A small set of commands may be issued on the xend command line: # # # # xend xend xend xend start stop restart status start xend, if not already running stop xend if already running restart xend if running, otherwise start it indicates xend status by its return code

A SysV init script called xend is provided to start xend at boot time. make install installs this script in /etc/init.d. To enable it, you have to make symbolic links in the appropriate runlevel directories or use the chkconfig tool, where available. Once xend is running, more sophisticated administration can be done using the xm tool (see Section 6.2) and the experimental Xensv web interface (see Section 6.3). As xend runs, events will be logged to /var/log/xend.log and, if the migration assistant daemon (xfrd) has been started, /var/log/xfrd.log. These may be of use for troubleshooting problems.

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6.2 Xm (command line interface)

The xm tool is the primary tool for managing Xen from the console. The general format of an xm command line is: # xm command [switches] [arguments] [variables] The available switches and arguments are dependent on the command chosen. The variables may be set using declarations of the form variable=value and command line declarations override any of the values in the conguration le being used, including the standard variables described above and any custom variables (for instance, the xmdefconfig le uses a vmid variable). The available commands are as follows: set-mem Request a domain to adjust its memory footprint. create Create a new domain. destroy Kill a domain immediately. list List running domains. shutdown Ask a domain to shutdown. dmesg Fetch the Xen (not Linux!) boot output. consoles Lists the available consoles. console Connect to the console for a domain. help Get help on xm commands. save Suspend a domain to disk. restore Restore a domain from disk. pause Pause a domains execution. unpause Unpause a domain. pincpu Pin a domain to a CPU. bvt Set BVT scheduler parameters for a domain. bvt ctxallow Set the BVT context switching allowance for the system. atropos Set the atropos parameters for a domain. rrobin Set the round robin time slice for the system. info Get information about the Xen host. call Call a xend HTTP API function directly. For a detailed overview of switches, arguments and variables to each command try # xm help command

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6.3 Xensv (web control interface)

Xensv is the experimental web control interface for managing a Xen machine. It can be used to perform some (but not yet all) of the management tasks that can be done using the xm tool. It can be started using: # xensv start and stopped using: # xensv stop By default, Xensv will serve out the web interface on port 8080. This can be changed by editing /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/xen/sv/params.py. Once Xensv is running, the web interface can be used to create and manage running domains.

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30

Chapter 7

Domain Conguration
The following contains the syntax of the domain conguration les and description of how to further specify networking, driver domain and general scheduling behaviour.

7.1 Conguration Files

Xen conguration les contain the following standard variables. Unless otherwise stated, conguration items should be enclosed in quotes: see /etc/xen/xmexample1 and /etc/xen/xmexample2 for concrete examples of the syntax. kernel Path to the kernel image ramdisk Path to a ramdisk image (optional). memory Memory size in megabytes. cpu CPU to run this domain on, or -1 for auto-allocation. console Port to export the domain console on (default 9600 + domain ID). nics Number of virtual network interfaces. vif List of MAC addresses (random addresses are assigned if not given) and bridges to use for the domains network interfaces, e.g. vif = [ mac=aa:00:00:00:00:11, bridge=xen-br0, bridge=xen-br1 ] to assign a MAC address and bridge to the rst interface and assign a different bridge to the second interface, leaving xend to choose the MAC address. disk List of block devices to export to the domain, e.g. disk = [ phy:hda1,sda1,r ] exports physical device /dev/hda1 to the domain as /dev/sda1 with readonly access. Exporting a disk read-write which is currently mounted is dangerous if you are certain you wish to do this, you can specify w! as the mode. 31

dhcp Set to dhcp if you want to use DHCP to congure networking. netmask Manually congured IP netmask. gateway Manually congured IP gateway. hostname Set the hostname for the virtual machine. root Specify the root device parameter on the kernel command line. nfs server IP address for the NFS server (if any). nfs root Path of the root lesystem on the NFS server (if any). extra Extra string to append to the kernel command line (if any) restart Three possible options: always Always restart the domain, no matter what its exit code is. never Never restart the domain. onreboot Restart the domain iff it requests reboot. For additional exibility, it is also possible to include Python scripting commands in conguration les. An example of this is the xmexample2 le, which uses Python code to handle the vmid variable.

7.2 Network Conguration

For many users, the default installation should work out of the box. More complicated network setups, for instance with multiple ethernet interfaces and/or existing bridging setups will require some special conguration. The purpose of this section is to describe the mechanisms provided by xend to allow a exible conguration for Xens virtual networking.

7.2.1

Xen virtual network topology

Each domain network interface is connected to a virtual network interface in dom0 by a point to point link (effectively a virtual crossover cable). These devices are named vif<domid>.<vifid> (e.g. vif1.0 for the rst interface in domain 1, vif3.1 for the second interface in domain 3). Trafc on these virtual interfaces is handled in domain 0 using standard Linux mechanisms for bridging, routing, rate limiting, etc. Xend calls on two shell scripts to perform initial conguration of the network and conguration of new virtual interfaces. By default, these scripts congure a single bridge for all the virtual interfaces. Arbitrary routing / bridging congurations can be congured by customising the scripts, as described in the following section.

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7.2.2

Xen networking scripts

Xens virtual networking is congured by two shell scripts (by default network and vif-bridge). These are called automatically by xend when certain events occur, with arguments to the scripts providing further contextual information. These scripts are found by default in /etc/xen/scripts. The names and locations of the scripts can be congured in /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp. network: This script is called whenever xend is started or stopped to respectively initialise or tear down the Xen virtual network. In the default conguration initialisation creates the bridge xen-br0 and moves eth0 onto that bridge, modifying the routing accordingly. When xend exits, it deletes the Xen bridge and removes eth0, restoring the normal IP and routing conguration. vif-bridge: This script is called for every domain virtual interface and can congure rewalling rules and add the vif to the appropriate bridge. By default, this adds and removes VIFs on the default Xen bridge. For more complex network setups (e.g. where routing is required or integrate with existing bridges) these scripts may be replaced with customised variants for your sites preferred conguration.

7.3 Driver Domain Conguration

I/O privileges can be assigned to allow a domain to directly access PCI devices itself. This is used to support driver domains. Setting backend privileges is currently only supported in SXP format cong les. To allow a domain to function as a backend for others, somewhere within the vm element of its conguration le must be a backend element of the form (backend (type)) where type may be either netif or blkif, according to the type of virtual device this domain will service. Note that a block backend cannot currently import virtual block devices from other domains, and a network backend cannot import virtual network devices from other domains. Thus (particularly in the case of block backends, which cannot import a virtual block device as their root lesystem), you may need to boot a backend domain from a ramdisk or a network device. Access to PCI devices may be congured on a per-device basis. Xen will assign the minimal set of hardware privileges to a domain that are required to control its devices. This can be congured in either format of conguration le: SXP Format: Include device elements of the form: (device (pci (bus x) (dev y) (func z))) inside the top-level vm element. Each one species the address of a device this 33

domain is allowed to access the numbers x,y and z may be in either decimal or hexadecimal format. Flat Format: Include a list of PCI device addresses of the format: pci = [x,y,z, ...] where each element in the list is a string specifying the components of the PCI device address, separated by commas. The components (x, y and z) of the list may be formatted as either decimal or hexadecimal.

7.4 Scheduler Conguration

Xen offers a boot time choice between multiple schedulers. To select a scheduler, pass the boot parameter sched=sched name to Xen, substituting the appropriate scheduler name. Details of the schedulers and their parameters are included below; future versions of the tools will provide a higher-level interface to these tools. It is expected that system administrators congure their system to use the scheduler most appropriate to their needs. Currently, the BVT scheduler is the recommended choice.

7.4.1

Borrowed Virtual Time

sched=bvt (the default) BVT provides proportional fair shares of the CPU time. It has been observed to penalise domains that block frequently (e.g. I/O intensive domains), but this can be compensated for by using warping. Global Parameters ctx allow the context switch allowance is similar to the quantum in traditional schedulers. It is the minimum time that a scheduled domain will be allowed to run before being pre-empted. Per-domain parameters mcuadv the MCU (Minimum Charging Unit) advance determines the proportional share of the CPU that a domain receives. It is set inversely proportionally to a domains sharing weight. warp the amount of virtual time the domain is allowed to warp backwards warpl the warp limit is the maximum time a domain can run warped for 34

warpu the unwarp requirement is the minimum time a domain must run unwarped for before it can warp again

7.4.2

Atropos

sched=atropos Atropos is a soft real time scheduler. It provides guarantees about absolute shares of the CPU, with a facility for sharing slack CPU time on a best-effort basis. It can provide timeliness guarantees for latency-sensitive domains. Every domain has an associated period and slice. The domain should receive slice nanoseconds every period nanoseconds. This allows the administrator to congure both the absolute share of the CPU a domain receives and the frequency with which it is scheduled. Note: dont overcommit the CPU when using Atropos (i.e. dont reserve more CPU than is available the utilisation should be kept to slightly less than 100% in order to ensure predictable behaviour). Per-domain parameters period The regular time interval during which a domain is guaranteed to receive its allocation of CPU time. slice The length of time per period that a domain is guaranteed to run for (in the absence of voluntary yielding of the CPU). latency The latency hint is used to control how soon after waking up a domain it should be scheduled. xtratime This is a boolean ag that species whether a domain should be allowed a share of the system slack time.

7.4.3

Round Robin

sched=rrobin The round robin scheduler is included as a simple demonstration of Xens internal scheduler API. It is not intended for production use.

35

Global Parameters rr slice The maximum time each domain runs before the next scheduling decision is made.

36

Chapter 8

Build, Boot and Debug options

This chapter describes the build- and boot-time options which may be used to tailor your Xen system.

8.1 Xen Build Options

Xen provides a number of build-time options which should be set as environment variables or passed on makes command-line. verbose=y Enable debugging messages when Xen detects an unexpected condition. Also enables console output from all domains. debug=y Enable debug assertions. Implies verbose=y. (Primarily useful for tracing bugs in Xen). debugger=y Enable the in-Xen debugger. This can be used to debug Xen, guest OSes, and applications. perfc=y Enable performance counters for signicant events within Xen. The counts can be reset or displayed on Xens console via console control keys. trace=y Enable per-cpu trace buffers which log a range of events within Xen for collection by control software.

8.2 Xen Boot Options

These options are used to congure Xens behaviour at runtime. They should be appended to Xens command line, either manually or by editing grub.conf. noreboot Dont reboot the machine automatically on errors. This is useful to catch debug output if you arent catching console messages via the serial line. nosmp Disable SMP support. This option is implied by ignorebiostables. 37

watchdog Enable NMI watchdog which can report certain failures. noirqbalance Disable software IRQ balancing and afnity. This can be used on systems such as Dell 1850/2850 that have workarounds in hardware for IRQ-routing issues. badpage=<page number>,<page number>, . . . Specify a list of pages not to be allocated for use because they contain bad bytes. For example, if your memory tester says that byte 0x12345678 is bad, you would place badpage=0x12345 on Xens command line. com1=<baud>,DPS,<io base>,<irq> com2=<baud>,DPS,<io base>,<irq> Xen supports up to two 16550-compatible serial ports. For example: com1=9600, 8n1, 0x408, 5 maps COM1 to a 9600-baud port, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit, I/O port base 0x408, IRQ 5. If some conguration options are standard (e.g., I/O base and IRQ), then only a prex of the full conguration string need be specied. If the baud rate is pre-congured (e.g., by the bootloader) then you can specify auto in place of a numeric baud rate. console=<specier list> Specify the destination for Xen console I/O. This is a commaseparated list of, for example: vga use VGA console and allow keyboard input com1 use serial port com1 com2H use serial port com2. Transmitted chars will have the MSB set. Received chars must have MSB set. com2L use serial port com2. Transmitted chars will have the MSB cleared. Received chars must have MSB cleared. The latter two examples allow a single port to be shared by two subsystems (e.g. console and debugger). Sharing is controlled by MSB of each transmitted/received character. [NB. Default for this option is com1,vga] sync console Force synchronous console output. This is useful if you system fails unexpectedly before it has sent all available output to the console. In most cases Xen will automatically enter synchronous mode when an exceptional event occurs, but this option provides a manual fallback. conswitch=<switch-char><auto-switch-char> Specify how to switch serial-console input between Xen and DOM0. The required sequence is CTRL-<switch-char> pressed three times. Specifying the backtick character disables switching. The <auto-switch-char> species whether Xen should auto-switch input to DOM0 when it boots if it is x then auto-switching is disabled. Any other value, or omitting the character, enables auto-switching. [NB. default switch-char is a] nmi=xxx Specify what to do with an NMI parity or I/O error. nmi=fatal: Xen prints a diagnostic and then hangs. 38

nmi=dom0: Inform DOM0 of the NMI. nmi=ignore: Ignore the NMI. mem=xxx Set the physical RAM address limit. Any RAM appearing beyond this physical address in the memory map will be ignored. This parameter may be specied with a B, K, M or G sufx, representing bytes, kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes respectively. The default unit, if no sufx is specied, is bytes. dom0 mem=xxx Set the amount of memory to be allocated to domain0. In Xen 3.x the parameter may be specied with a B, K, M or G sufx, representing bytes, kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes respectively; if no sufx is specied, the parameter defaults to kilobytes. In previous versions of Xen, sufxes were not supported and the value is always interpreted as kilobytes. tbuf size=xxx Set the size of the per-cpu trace buffers, in pages (default 1). Note that the trace buffers are only enabled in debug builds. Most users can ignore this feature completely. sched=xxx Select the CPU scheduler Xen should use. The current possibilities are bvt (default), atropos and rrobin. For more information see Section 7.4. apic verbosity=debug,verbose Print more detailed information about local APIC and IOAPIC conguration. lapic Force use of local APIC even when left disabled by uniprocessor BIOS. nolapic Ignore local APIC in a uniprocessor system, even if enabled by the BIOS. apic=bigsmp,default,es7000,summit Specify NUMA platform. This can usually be probed automatically. In addition, the following options may be specied on the Xen command line. Since domain 0 shares responsibility for booting the platform, Xen will automatically propagate these options to its command line. These options are taken from Linuxs commandline syntax with unchanged semantics. acpi=off,force,strict,ht,noirq,. . . Modify how Xen (and domain 0) parses the BIOS ACPI tables. acpi skip timer override Instruct Xen (and domain 0) to ignore timer-interrupt override instructions specied by the BIOS ACPI tables. noapic Instruct Xen (and domain 0) to ignore any IOAPICs that are present in the system, and instead continue to use the legacy PIC.

8.3 XenLinux Boot Options

In addition to the standard Linux kernel boot options, we support:

39

xencons=xxx Specify the device node to which the Xen virtual console driver is attached. The following options are supported: xencons=off: disable virtual console xencons=tty: attach console to /dev/tty1 (tty0 at boot-time) xencons=ttyS: attach console to /dev/ttyS0 The default is ttyS for dom0 and tty for all other domains.

8.4 Debugging
Xen has a set of debugging features that can be useful to try and gure out whats going on. Hit h on the serial line (if you specied a baud rate on the Xen command line) or ScrollLock-h on the keyboard to get a list of supported commands. If you have a crash youll likely get a crash dump containing an EIP (PC) which, along with an objdump -d image, can be useful in guring out whats happened. Debug a Xenlinux image just as you would any other Linux kernel.

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Chapter 9

Further Support
If you have questions that are not answered by this manual, the sources of information listed below may be of interest to you. Note that bug reports, suggestions and contributions related to the software (or the documentation) should be sent to the Xen developers mailing list (address below).

9.1 Other Documentation

For developers interested in porting operating systems to Xen, the Xen Interface Manual is distributed in the docs/ directory of the Xen source distribution.

9.2 Online References

The ofcial Xen web site is found at: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/netos/xen/ This contains links to the latest versions of all on-line documentation (including the lateset version of the FAQ).

9.3 Mailing Lists

There are currently four ofcial Xen mailing lists: [email protected] Used for development discussions and bug reports. Subscribe at:
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel

[email protected] Used for installation and usage discussions and re-

41

quests for help. Subscribe at:

http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

[email protected] Used for announcements only. Subscribe at:

http://lists.xensource.com/xen-announce

[email protected] Changelog feed from the unstable and 2.0 trees - developer oriented. Subscribe at:
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-changelog

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Appendix A

Installing Xen / XenLinux on Debian

The Debian project provides a tool called debootstrap which allows a base Debian system to be installed into a lesystem without requiring the host system to have any Debian-specic software (such as apt. Heres some info how to install Debian 3.1 (Sarge) for an unprivileged Xen domain: 1. Set up Xen 2.0 and test that its working, as described earlier in this manual. 2. Create disk images for root-fs and swap (alternatively, you might create dedicated partitions, LVM logical volumes, etc. if that suits your setup).
dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/diskimage bs=1024k count=size_in_mbytes dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/swapimage bs=1024k count=size_in_mbytes

If youre going to use this lesystem / disk image only as a template for other vm disk images, something like 300 MB should be enough.. (of course it depends what kind of packages you are planning to install to the template) 3. Create the lesystem and initialise the swap image
mkfs.ext3 /path/diskimage mkswap /path/swapimage

4. Mount the disk image for installation

mount -o loop /path/diskimage /mnt/disk

5. Install debootstrap Make sure you have debootstrap installed on the host. If you are running Debian sarge (3.1 / testing) or unstable you can install it by running apt-get install debootstrap. Otherwise, it can be downloaded from the Debian project website. 6. Install Debian base to the disk image:
debootstrap --arch i386 sarge /mnt/disk \

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http://ftp.<countrycode>.debian.org/debian

You can use any other Debian http/ftp mirror you want. 7. When debootstrap completes successfully, modify settings:
chroot /mnt/disk /bin/bash

Edit the following les using vi or nano and make needed changes:
/etc/hostname /etc/hosts /etc/resolv.conf /etc/network/interfaces /etc/networks

Set up access to the services, edit:

/etc/hosts.deny /etc/hosts.allow /etc/inetd.conf

Add Debian mirror to:

/etc/apt/sources.list

Create fstab like this:

/dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 proc / none /proc ext3 swap proc errors=remount-ro sw defaults 0 0 0 1 0 0

Logout 8. Unmount the disk image

umount /mnt/disk

9. Create Xen 2.0 conguration le for the new domain. You can use the examplecongurations coming with Xen as a template. Make sure you have the following set up:
disk = [ file:/path/diskimage,sda1,w, file:/path/swapimage,sda2,w ] root = "/dev/sda1 ro"

10. Start the new domain

xm create -f domain_config_file

Check that the new domain is running:

xm list

11. Attach to the console of the new domain. You should see something like this when starting the new domain:
Started domain testdomain2, console on port 9626

There you can see the ID of the console: 26. You can also list the consoles with xm consoles (ID is the last two digits of the port number.)

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Attach to the console:

xm console 26

or by telnetting to the port 9626 of localhost (the xm console program works better). 12. Log in and run base-cong As a default theres no password for the root. Check that everything looks OK, and the system started without errors. Check that the swap is active, and the network settings are correct. Run /usr/sbin/base-config to set up the Debian settings. Set up the password for root using passwd. 13. Done. You can exit the console by pressing Ctrl + ] If you need to create new domains, you can just copy the contents of the templateimage to the new disk images, either by mounting the template and the new image, and using cp -a or tar or by simply copying the image le. Once this is done, modify the image-specic settings (hostname, network settings, etc).

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46

Appendix B

Installing Xen / XenLinux on Redhat or Fedora Core

When using Xen / XenLinux on a standard Linux distribution there are a couple of things to watch out for: Note that, because domains0 dont have any privileged access at all, certain commands in the default boot sequence will fail e.g. attempts to update the hwclock, change the console font, update the keytable map, start apmd (power management), or gpm (mouse cursor). Either ignore the errors (they should be harmless), or remove them from the startup scripts. Deleting the following links are a good start: S24pcmcia, S09isdn, S17keytable, S26apmd, S85gpm. If you want to use a single root le system that works cleanly for both domain 0 and unprivileged domains, a useful trick is to use different init run levels. For example, use run level 3 for domain 0, and run level 4 for other domains. This enables different startup scripts to be run in depending on the run level number passed on the kernel command line. If using NFS root les systems mounted either from an external server or from domain0 there are a couple of other gotchas. The default /etc/sysconfig/iptables rules block NFS, so part way through the boot sequence things will suddenly go dead. If youre planning on having a separate NFS /usr partition, the RH9 boot scripts dont make life easy - they attempt to mount NFS le systems way to late in the boot process. The easiest way I found to do this was to have a /linuxrc script run ahead of /sbin/init that mounts /usr:
#!/bin/bash /sbin/ipconfig lo 127.0.0.1 /sbin/portmap /bin/mount /usr exec /sbin/init "$@" <>/dev/console 2>&1

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The one slight complication with the above is that /sbin/portmap is dynamically linked against /usr/lib/libwrap.so.0 Since this is in /usr, it wont work. This can be solved by copying the le (and link) below the /usr mount point, and just let the le be covered when the mount happens. In some installations, where a shared read-only /usr is being used, it may be desirable to move other large directories over into the read-only /usr. For example, you might replace /bin, /lib and /sbin with links into /usr/root/bin, /usr/root/lib and /usr/root/sbin respectively. This creates other problems for running the /linuxrc script, requiring bash, portmap, mount, ifcong, and a handful of other shared libraries to be copied below the mount point a simple statically-linked C program would solve this problem.

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Appendix C

Glossary of Terms
Atropos One of the CPU schedulers provided by Xen. Atropos provides domains with absolute shares of the CPU, with timeliness guarantees and a mechanism for sharing out slack time. BVT The BVT scheduler is used to give proportional fair shares of the CPU to domains. Exokernel A minimal piece of privileged code, similar to a microkernel but providing a more hardware-like interface to the tasks it manages. This is similar to a paravirtualising VMM like Xen but was designed as a new operating system structure, rather than specically to run multiple conventional OSs. Domain A domain is the execution context that contains a running virtual machine. The relationship between virtual machines and domains on Xen is similar to that between programs and processes in an operating system: a virtual machine is a persistent entity that resides on disk (somewhat like a program). When it is loaded for execution, it runs in a domain. Each domain has a domain ID. Domain 0 The rst domain to be started on a Xen machine. Domain 0 is responsible for managing the system. Domain ID A unique identier for a domain, analogous to a process ID in an operating system. Full virtualisation An approach to virtualisation which requires no modications to the hosted operating system, providing the illusion of a complete system of real hardware devices. Hypervisor An alternative term for VMM, used because it means beyond supervisor, since it is responsible for managing multiple supervisor kernels. Live migration A technique for moving a running virtual machine to another physical host, without stopping it or the services running on it. Microkernel A small base of code running at the highest hardware privilege level. A 49

microkernel is responsible for sharing CPU and memory (and sometimes other devices) between less privileged tasks running on the system. This is similar to a VMM, particularly a paravirtualising VMM but typically addressing a different problem space and providing different kind of interface. NetBSD/Xen A port of NetBSD to the Xen architecture. Paravirtualisation An approach to virtualisation which requires modications to the operating system in order to run in a virtual machine. Xen uses paravirtualisation but preserves binary compatibility for user space applications. Shadow pagetables A technique for hiding the layout of machine memory from a virtual machines operating system. Used in some VMMs to provide the illusion of contiguous physical memory, in Xen this is used during live migration. Virtual Machine The environment in which a hosted operating system runs, providing the abstraction of a dedicated machine. A virtual machine may be identical to the underlying hardware (as in full virtualisation, or it may differ, as in paravirtualisation. VMM Virtual Machine Monitor - the software that allows multiple virtual machines to be multiplexed on a single physical machine. Xen Xen is a paravirtualising virtual machine monitor, developed primarily by the Systems Research Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. XenLinux Ofcial name for the port of the Linux kernel that runs on Xen.

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