Re: [MirageOS-devel] xenserver on arm

[Dave Scott <Dave.Scott@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12 Jul 2014, at 13:09, Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 11 Jul 2014, at 18:17, buzz heavyyear <buzzheavyyear@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>> I'm at the point with what I'm doing where having some form of remote 
>> management would be very useful. Certainly, for the time being, remotely 
>> deploying mirage instances on a running cubieboard would make life a lot 
>> easier for me.
>> 
>> Xenserver & xapi seem to offer all of the bells and whistles that hit the 
>> nail on the head.
>> 
>> I tried to build xenserver using the link that Dave posted some time back 
>> (https://github.com/xenserver/buildroot/pull/427) but hit things I didn't 
>> really understand.
>> 
>> So, I'd like to press on and hopefully contribute something back, but I'm 
>> wondering if I'm jumping the gun with all of this and perhaps should wait a 
>> while. On the other hand, if someone thinks the time is right and would give 
>> me a few  points on how to procede then I'd be very grateful.
> 
> XenServer's probably a little heavyweight for the little ARM.  It would be 
> worth trying to manage it remotely via libvirt instead, which has 
> increasingly improved Xen bindings for xl.  If you gave that a try and report 
> any issues back (libvirt.org), that would be most interesting (it's on my 
> list but I haven't had a chance yet).

It would be interesting to hear how well libvirt + libxl works.

With “xapi”, you get a set of daemons which can be used separately or together. 
The full set does build and run in the Cubie2 environment, with the following 
caveats:

* it’s been tried exactly twice :-) and needs a bit more debugging

* in some cases we had to package more recent versions of some of the base 
OCaml libraries than were available in Ubuntu trusty. There’s a bug (which I 
think Euan Harris was working on) which manifested whenever Ubuntu updated its 
package — the xapi build environment would produce libraries with the same 
version number as Ubuntu’s but with different CRCs. The install environment 
would then select the wrong package and give a confusing error (failed to 
install liblwt-ocaml-<part of CRC>)

* starting a VM worked ok but a libxl event was lost somewhere while shutting 
it down. It could be that the Mirage guest was so quick to shutdown that it 
exposed a race condition somewhere.

We’re in the middle of adding Ubuntu trusty to our CI environment to capture 
the generic package building problems that affect both x86_64 and armhf. After 
that I’d like to track down the libxl issue which is probably also common. 
After that it should work a bit better!

Cheers,
Dave
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