From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ferdinand Brasser Subject: [HotSwap] Live Update for Xen Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2014 14:22:57 +0100 Message-ID: <1389964977.2099.3.camel@64bitDom0> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xen.org Errors-To: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xen.org To: xen-devel@lists.xen.org Cc: mihai.bucicoiu@trust.cased.de List-Id: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org Dear all, My name is Ferdinand Brasser, research assistant at CASED/TU Darmstadt. Here at CASED, we have developed a live updating mechanism for Xen, which we call it HotSwap. Currently we have a prototype for Xen 4.2 and would like to know if there is any interest from the community to integrate our approach into Xen. If so, some advice on how to proceed is welcomed. Our approach to update Xen is - very high level - to load a complete new version of Xen at runtime and then transfer the state of the old version to the new one. Afterwards the execution is continued by the new version. We make use of Xen functions to disable all but one CPU and interrupts during the update process to keep the state consistent while transferring. We have evaluate our prototype with the result that the update process takes about 45ms on our test system. We hope you guys find this work interesting and we would be happy to work together with you to make our prototype a usable and reliable function of Xen. Regards, Ferdinand