Re: [Xen-devel] Anyone using blktap2?

[Rich Persaud <persaur@xxxxxxxxx>]

On May 13, 2019, at 11:34, Wei Liu <wei.liu2@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello

Seeing that you were the last people who changed blktap2 in a meaningful
way: do you use it at all?

As discussed F2F in a Xen Summit 2017 design session: OpenXT and Citrix XenServer use blktap. VHD encryption support was recently upstreamed from OpenXT to the Citrix-maintained repo [1] for blktap3 [2], now used by OpenXT.  Prior versions of OpenXT use blktap2.

Citrix changed the license of XAPI blktap from GPL to BSD, to enable non-OSS features in the paid version of XenServer. The XAPI blktap repo is actively maintained, with dozens of commits in 2018 and 2019, the most recent being this week.

If the XAPI [3] blktap repos are part of Xen Project, should LibXL support a Xen Project feature that is actively maintained and shipping in production systems? Does the blktap3 repo [1] need to be separated from XAPI?  Perhaps a topic for discussion at the upcoming Xen Summit.

I'm thinking about dropping it (again).

What would be the proposed mechanism for Xen VM block storage backed by thin-provisioned VHD files with per-VM encryption keys? This capability was sufficiently valuable to be upstreamed by Citrix, from OpenXT to Xen Project XAPI in 2018.  

With the imminent arrival of Windows Hyper-V and WSL2 Linux 4.19 on developer desktops, VHD support (i.e. Microsoft storage interoperability) in Xen may be a feature to improve rather than remove.

Rich

[1] https://github.com/xapi-project/blktap

[2] https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Blktap3

[3] https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/xen-api/

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