[Xen-users] rump kernels running on the Xen hypervisor

[Antti Kantee <pooka@xxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I have written initial support for running rump kernels directly on top 
the Xen hypervisor.  Rump kernels essentially consist of unmodified 
kernel drivers, but without the added baggage associated with full 
operating systems such as a scheduling policy, VM, multiprocess support, 
and so forth.  In essence, the work enables running minimal single-image 
application domains on top of Xen while relying on real-world proven 
kernel-quality drivers, including file systems, TCP/IP, SoftRAID, disk 
encryption, etc.  Rump kernels provide a subset of the POSIX'y 
application interfaces relevant for e.g. file systems and networking, so 
adapting existing applications is possible.
I have pushed the implementation to github.  If you wish the try the few 
demos I put together, follow the instructions in the README.  Please 
report any and all bugs via the github interface.  Testing so far was 
light, but given that I wrote less than 1k lines of code including 
comments and whitespace, I hope I haven't managed to cram too many bugs 
in there. I've done my testing on a x86_32 Dom0 with Xen 4.2.2.
        https://github.com/anttikantee/rumpuser-xen/

I'll explain the implementation in a bit more detail.  Rump kernels are 
made possible the anykernel architecture of NetBSD.  Rump kernels run on 
top of the rump kernel hypercall layer, so the implementation was a 
matter of writing an implementation of the hypercalls for the Xen 
hypervisor.  I started looking at the Xen Mini-OS to figure out how to 
bootstrap a domU, and quickly realized that Mini-OS implements almost 
everything the rump kernel hypercall layer requires: a build infra, 
cooperative thread scheduling, physical memory allocation, simple 
interfaces to I/O devices such as block/net, and so forth.  As a result, 
the implementation is more or less plugged on top of Mini-OS, and 
contains a lot of code unnecessary for rump kernels.  I'm unsure if I 
should fully fork Mini-OS or attempt to merge some of my changes back. 
For example, it seems like the host namespace leaks into Mini-OS (i.e. 
-nostdinc isn't used), and it would be nice to get that fixed.  If 
anyone has any smart ideas about which direction to go in, please advise.
I thank the people who have suggested this project over the years.  I 
believe the first one to suggest it on a public list was Jean-Yves 
Migeon quite some years ago, so explicit thanks go to him and "you know 
who you are" thanks go to others.  I also thank Juan RP of Void Linux, 
who re-added support to Void for Xen 4.2 about 5 minutes after I told 
him I'd like to do some Xen testing with a x86_32 Dom0 (moving to 64bit 
systems is on my TODO list ;)
  - antti

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