Re: [Xen-devel] Xen & Automated Disk Management for Domains

[Ian Pratt <Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I haven't gotten snapshots working yet...in my last attempts, I've
> gotten a kernel NULL pointer dereference when trying to create a
> snapshot.  I haven't put much effort into tracking the problem down, so
> I'm not even sure if it's Xen-related yet, but I'd like to look into it
> more soon.  Perhaps with XenoLinux 2.6 ready to run as Domain 0, I can
> give that a shot as well--I'm currently using 2.4.

AFAIK, LVM2 broke snapshot functionality, but that it'll be going
back into 2.6.8 (which will likely be released in the next week
or two).

> > [The LVM snapshot device is a bit 'odd' for our purposes as
> > writes occur in-place, with the old block contents being copied
> > to a log device. It would make more sense if we slightly modified
> > the code to have the writes go to the log and leave the original
> > device pristine. ]
> 
> Very true, but I don't know how much work this would be.  Since I
> haven't been able to test, I don't know how multiple COW images of the
> same underlying disk would work in the current implementation (if at
> all).  They would certainly work better with the behavior you describe.

I believe it should b e pretty easy to change the
behaviour. Alternatively, Bin Ren's CoW md block driver is
believed to work and is rather simpler....

> > xend is intended to be extensible for exactly this sort of
> > thing. Mike's writing a manual for it, which should be going into
> > the tree RSN.
> 
> I've been reading over some of the code for xend the last few days, so I
> at least have some ideas for how to proceed.  I'm hoping that I wouldn't
> be stepping on anyone else's toes or duplicating work if I did work on
> this.

I'm certainly not aware of anyone working in this area.

Ian


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