[Xen-devel] Administrating Xen

["Retzki, Sascha [Xplain]" <sascha.retzki@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,


this question may be better on the users-list (or cross-post), but
anyway:


First off, there is some key-combination to make up a xen-console (or
switch them?)? If yes, what is it again ^^?


Anyway, the thing is that we have/maintain userspace-tools, which depend
on python *and* (currently?) on Twisted (which is a mess to set-up,
imho), but we *could* do it in a more general way. If we already have
code to catch certain keyboard events, like ctrl+a three times (is this
the answer to question one?), what about a internal xen command line? 
The idea that we offer an API to administrate the Xen-host
(create/destroy domains, change their memory usage, and whatnot) is a
very good thing. Now the best thing would be if the user could press
ctrl+escape (imaginary key combination) three times, and Xen switches to
some console and display a xen> prompt (or whatever), and the user can
do everything we normally do with xm(...), making user-space tools
totally obsolete.
At this point, we 
1.) would not have to maintain user-space tools anymore. If the API
changes, we just adjust the Documentation and our internal prompt. 
2.) don't have to care about dom0. Be it Linux, *BSD, be it an OS where
python does not run on, etc.

Topic 2 is of course more problematic... what if a graphical system is
fired up? How do we switch to a textural console? I don't know VGA (or
even others) enough to answer this question, I'd assume the best way
would be to inform the dom0 to switch to textmode (and back).


Comments?

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