Re: Proposal for init/kexec/hotplug format for Xen

[Harry Butterworth <harry@hebutterworth.freeserve.co.uk>]

On Sun, 2005-02-27 at 12:24 -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote: 
> Harry Butterworth wrote:
> 
> >>We could begin work today on libxen-hcall and libxen-idc while we work 
> >>out what the store is going to like and how the OF structure is going to 
> >>work.  Thoughts?
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >The most difficult aspect of the inter-domain communication API to
> >express from the point of view of forwards compatibility with a
> >fault-tolerant implementation is that, in a fault-tolerant system with
> >different levels of fault tolerance, some domains will come and go
> >whilst others persist across failures.
> >
> >  

When I said "from the point of view of forwards compatibility with a
fault-tolerant implementation" above I meant from the point of view of
forwards compatibility with a fault-tolerant _domain_ implementation.

> >
> I'm not sure fault-tolerance has to be implemented at the IDC primative 
> level.  That seems like something that's implemented at a slightly 
> higher-level in the stack.

Right, the IDC primitives themselves do not have to be fault tolerant...

> It would probably be better to expect to implement a separate set of 
> fault tolerant devices and just design the non-tolerant devices for 
> maximum code-reuse.

...the trick is to implement a set of IDC primitives that A) can be used
as the underlying communication mechanism to implement fault tolerant
domains by, for example, using the replicated state machine approach to
create a fault-tolerant domain out of a set of base domains and B) are
then compatible with providing _exactly_ _the_ _same_ _API_ inside the
fault-tolerant domain such that the software running inside the FT
domain can be the same software that would run in a base domain.

With this approach, you only have to implement fault-tolerance once and
from then on you get it for free wherever you want it and you get
_maximum_ code reuse because you can reuse all of your non-fault
tolerant code as fault-tolerant code simply by running it unchanged but
in a fault-tolerant domain.

Do not underestimate the importance of this.

-- 
Harry Butterworth <harry@hebutterworth.freeserve.co.uk>





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