Re: [Xen-users] Domain replication

[Michael Vrable <mvrable@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 11:50:30PM -0500, jaikumar Ganesh wrote:
> Hi Michael, Sylvain and others..
> Thanks for the replies..
> It would be great if you could provide some more details..
> 
> a) How exactly do I copy the memory and files? Is there any built in command
> that will do that for us?

There's not a built-in command that will do this.  For the Potemkin
work, I hacked up an "xm fork" command that did some of the work, but
this was only called as part of larger processing by the Potemkin
control software, which was handling some of the work itself.

Copying of memory was handled by "xm fork".  Disk was not--in fact, we
didn't have disk working, and were using ramdisks.

> b) Can I migrate between domains on the same machine ? Does Xen provide this
> support?

I'm not sure I quite understand how this fits in with the question
above...do you mean migration in the sense of live migration as
described at NSDI?  Xen can migrate a domain to the same host, but
that's moving a domain back to the same machine, and not moving anything
between domains per se.  Can you explain better what it is you're
looking for?

> c) It would be great if you could provide some more details about how you
> went about implementing cloning in Potemkin honeyfarm work ? You mentioned
> about a customized version of xen, that does it for you.. Is this available
> for use by others ( i am also using this for a research project in a
> university).

I presented a paper at SOSP last week describing the work.  The paper is
linked to from my homepage, http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~mvrable/.

I can provide a snapshot of the code used for the paper, but it is based
on an old version of Xen (from early August) and has some stability
issues.  I'm working on cleaning it up, but don't have code to show for
that yet.

> d) It would also be great if you could provide us with some hints (or are
> there some hooks provided by Xen) to capture all the Xen calls made by
> domain 1 , so that we can replay them on another configuration on domain 2.

I can't help you here.  Depending upon what it is you need, some of the
work with ReVirt may be applicable (you should be able to search around
for the papers describing it--it's work out of Peter Chen's group at the
University of Michigan, but I don't have links handy).  ReVirt wasn't
written for Xen, but is being ported to Xen.

Sorry for the slow reply; I was at SOSP last week (presenting Potemkin),
and haven't yet made it back home.

--Michael Vrable

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