Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/7] merge some xen bits into qemu

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 03:58:15PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Anthony Liguori writes ("Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/7] merge some xen bits into qemu"):
> > I think it's more closely related to Xenite and Xenner.  Gerd: are you 
> > planning on folding in domain creation?  Right now it appears to be a 
> > helper launched after the domain creation.
> ...
> > No, it's definitely for use with Xen (hypervisor).  But it's different 
> > architecturally from how Xen uses QEMU in xen-unstable.
> 
> Xenner is an emulator for allowing Xen domUs to be booted without the
> Xen hypervisor.
> 
> Xennite is an experimental replacement for the Xen userland management
> stack in dom0: it moves more functionality from the Xen tools in dom0
> into the qemu-dm process.  This is moving in almost the opposite
> direction to Xen upstream is moving: we are moving qemu-dm into its
> own tiny domain, so that the qemu code doesn't need to run as a
> process in dom0; this has important security and scalability
> advantages.

Yes, to be clear that the Xennite code is *not* an official Xen project. 

It is my experimental work and I don't expect anyone to use it for real
in the near future. It does however align very well with Gerd's serious 
Xenner project (which is incredibly useful tool allowing admins to mix
and match Xen and KVM) since both Xenner & Xennite have much same needs
in  terms of QEMU support code

The motiviation with 'Xennite' is to make the process of launching
and managing an instance of a Xen guest, as close as possible to that
of KVM. Start QEMU to launch the Xen guest, interact with the monitor
to control it, and kill QEMU to destroy the Xen guest. I'd class it as
a proof-of-concept since I never got around to making stuff like save
and restore work - I postponed further work until Xen re-synced with a
new QEMU codebase.  We could have a long discussion about the pros/cons
of this idea vs the upstream Xen move to QEMU in stub domains, but that's
off topic for this list, so I'll leave it :-)  

Daniel
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