Re: [Publicity] Xen 4.4 features for press release

[Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 06/01/14 19:18, Lars Kurth wrote:
> On 16/12/2013 13:46, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
>> On 16/12/13 14:15, George Dunlap wrote:
>>> Below is the list of features in 4.4, explained as may be suitable for a
>>> press release.  Let me know if you have any corrections or improvements.
>>>
>>>   -George
>>>
>>> * Non-Linux driver domains.  One of Xen's unique features is that it
>>> is designed to run drivers inside of VMs, allowing better performance,
>>> security, and flexibility.  Until now, however, the core driver domain
>>> functionality required udev, which is only available in Linux.  This
>>> has been replaced with a daemon, allowing arbitrary OSes to be
>>> used as driver domains.
>> This is not exactly true. The removal of udev from driver domains was
>> done so that Linux driver domains could use Qdisk backends. FreeBSD
>> doesn't require either udev or the libxl driver daemon in order to work
>> as a driver domain since everything is handled inside of the kernel (and
>> of course doesn't support Qdisk).
>>
>> [...]
> Roger, can you expand on this. Obviously Non-Linux driver domains as
> title for this feature is wrong now. It probably ought to be called
> Qdisk support for driver domains (or more flexible driver domains). What
> are the actual implications for security, performance, ... (sorry, I
> couldnt find much about udeb and qdisk).

There's no security or performance implications AFAICT, that's what I
would write about it:

* Improved flexibility in driver domains

Linux driver domains used to rely on udev events in order to launch
backends for guests. With Xen 4.4, the dependency on udev is replaced
with a custom daemon built on top of libxl, that provides greater
flexibility in order to run user-space backends inside of driver
domains. As an example, this allows driver domains to use Qdisk
backends, which was not possible with udev.


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