Re: [HotSwap] Live Update for Xen

[Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>]

On 17/01/14 13:22, Ferdinand Brasser wrote:
> 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

Hello,

This looks like a fantastic area to be working in, and I am sure people
would be interested in playing with it

As far as how to proceed, your best bet would be to provide some code
and instructions, perhaps with a step-by-step guide for a demo?

~Andrew