Re: [Xen-devel] stage1-xen for Fedora

[Rajiv Ranganath <rajiv.ranganath@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Stefano,

On Wed, Aug 2, 2017 at 12:15 AM, Stefano Stabellini
<stefano@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

> The main thing that will be different is the list of dependencies you
> need to install to build Xen. On Fedora it should be (I am using
> Raisin[1] as a reference):

Thank you for the pointer to Raisin.

I have managed to build stage1-xen on Fedora. This project is very
interesting. I have some questions regarding stage1-xen and containers
on Xen.

1. Is there a roadmap/design doc for containers primitives and container
standards that Xen community is looking to support?

The only documentation that I could find were presentations by you.
[1][2]

2. Now that OCI 1.0 is out, are there any plans to create a Xen based
OCI runtime? [3]

A Xen based OCI runtime that can work with containerd and cri-o would be
very interesting to us.

I was wondering if you have thoughts on how xen-stage1 could be evolved
to support rkt and also also a OCI runtime?

3. Are there plans to use PVHv2 guests instead of PV guests?

4. In the presentation I noticed PV Calls for Networking. However when I
did `rkt run ...`, it seems to use netback with vif-nat. How can I try
PV calls for networking?

[...]

> Let me know if you find any issues!

Following are the issues that I ran into -

1. `rkt rm ...` fails with `stage1/rootfs/gc` file not found error. I
think because of this the Xen host gets populated with a lot of
overlayfs mounts. I tried to manually clean up, but that failed too.

2. Upstream cni master seems to have reorganized its directory
structure. So, I had to pin the version to 0.3 to get the build to work.
I also had to manually get dhcp4 and dhcp4client packages. Perhaps we
can add a glide.lock file to lock down the dependencies. I can send a
patch for it.

> I would be very happy to take a patch (or pull request) for
> BUILDING.md to document how to do this on Fedora.

I have a somewhat "non-standard" setup for xen and qemu for Fedora. I'll
briefly describe the setup.

Xen is booted using EFI. This required building a custom binutils
package [4]. Both Xen and qemu are built with a non-standard prefix
(/opt/xen-unstable and /opt/qemu-stable), with RPATHs appropriately
adjusted.

Lastly I don't use systemd to manage Xen on Fedora. In the buildroot,
Xen is explicitly configured using --disable-systemd. We have a version
of runit package that we run under systemd. Runit then launches
xenstore, xenconsole, dom0 qemu disk backend. We frequently toggle
between upstart and systemd based distro, so using runit on both has
been very helpful.

If this setup is okay you, I can open up the Fedora variant of our tools
and packages and send patches to BUILDING.md.

Please let me know.

Thank you!

Best,
Rajiv

[1]: 
https://xendeveloperanddesignsummit2017.sched.com/event/AjGx/keynote-secure-containers-with-xen-and-coreos-rkt-stefano-stabellini-aporeto
[2]: 
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dP_7myrUrtwQHnjgDtlMQkAxJNG6Se9SBl0tdaFIAYQ/edit?usp=sharing
[3]: 
https://github.com/opencontainers/runtime-spec/blob/master/implementations.md
[4]: https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_EFI

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