Re: Disaggregated (Xoar) Dom0 Building

[Teddy Astie <teddy.astie@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Lonnie,

Le 27/06/2024 à 11:33, Lonnie Cumberland a écrit :
> I am working towards is to have
> everything as a RAM-based ultra-lightweight thin hypervisor.   I looked
> over ACRN, the NOVA Microhypervisor (Headron, Beadrock Udo),
> Rust-Shyper, Bareflank-MicroV, and many other development efforts but it
> seems that Xen is the most advanced for my purposes here.
>

You can have a disk-less (or ramdisk based) distro supporting Xen with
Alpine Linux (with Xen flavour). It does still use Dom0 with all its
responsibilities though.

>>> Currently, I am investigating and researching the ideas of
>>> "Disaggregating" Dom0 and have the Xoar Xen patches ("Breaking Up is
>>> Hard to Do: Security and Functionality in a Commodity Hypervisor"
>>> 2011) available which were developed against version 22155 of
>>> xen-unstable. The Linux patches are against Linux with pvops
>>> 2.6.31.13 and developed on a standard Ubuntu 10.04 install. My effort
>>> would also be up update these patches.
>>>
>>> I have been able to locate the Xen "Dom0 Disaggregation"
>>> (https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Dom0_Disaggregation) am reading up
>>> on things now but wanted to ask the developers list about any
>>> experience you may have had in this area since the research objective
>>> is to integrate Xoar with the latest Xen 4.20, if possible, and to
>>> take it further to basically eliminate Dom0 all together with
>>> individual Mini-OS or Unikernel "Service and Driver VM's" instead
>>> that are loaded at UEFI boot time.

The latest stuff going on I have in mind regarding this idea of moving
stuff out of Dom0 is QEMU as Unikernel (using Unikraft), there were some
discussions on this in Matrix and at Xen Summit, and it's currently work
in progress from Unikraft side.

Teddy


Teddy Astie | Vates XCP-ng Intern

XCP-ng & Xen Orchestra - Vates solutions

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