Re: Disaggregated (Xoar) Dom0 Building

[Teddy Astie <teddy.astie@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Lonnie,

There are dedicated Matrix channels for chat
https://xenproject.org/help/matrix/

Teddy

Le 27/06/2024 à 15:38, Lonnie a écrit :
> Hi Teddy,
>
> You are actually on track with what I was thinking in this area which 
> initially gave me 2 main ideas:
>
> 1. Take the NOVA Microhypervisor (very small TCB at only 5K LOC) and try to 
> get QEMU or Bhyve integrated as the VMM which would require a huge amount of 
> development time.  The Genode framework has a configuration/compile approach 
> that uses NOVA with a custom VirtualBox, but I did not want to go that route.
>
> 2. Take the Alpine XEN distro as the base and then update the dated Xoar 
> patches which effectively breaks Dom0 into 9 Service and Driver Mini/Nano VMs 
> for which I was thinking about further setting them up as ultra-thin 
> Unikernels (MirageOS, IncludeOS, etc.) but still researching.
>
> My effort is to make a purely Ultra-Thin RAM-Based Xen Hypervisor that boots 
> UEFI for modern systems. Plus a number of other features if all goes well.
>
> Your ideas of QEMU as a Unikernel would probably really work for both XEN and 
> NOVA (with a bit of work on the NOVA side). I actually liked NOVA and 
> experimented with it a while back being able to produce a very lightweight 
> Microhypervisor ISO that would boot and do some simple things and even fire 
> up lightweight Linux instances but with very limited capabilities, of course, 
> just to see if it worked. Unfortunately, that direction although very 
> interesting, would definitely take too much development to make a viable and 
> more complete hypervisor.  I did like that you could easily start with no VM 
> and easily start one or more and then use Hot-Keys to flip between consoles. 
> That was pretty cool and is something that I would like to see about working 
> into this XEN effort as well maybe some config file in the Xen.efi directory 
> for that or something but am still thinking about it.
>
> I think that perhaps the Alpine-XEN-Xoar approach could be benefitual but 
> XEN, plus supporting libraries is still a bit larger than I would have hoped 
> although you get more capabilities and more of a solid hypervisor as well, I 
> think.  Maybe we can chat more about things if you like.
>
> Best,
> Lonnie
> On Thursday, June 27, 2024 14:38 CEST, Teddy Astie <teddy.astie@xxxxxxxxxx> 
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Lonnie,
>>
>> Le 27/06/2024 à 11:33, Lonnie Cumberland a écrit :
>>> I am working towards is to have
>>> everything as a RAM-based ultra-lightweight thin hypervisor.   I looked
>>> over ACRN, the NOVA Microhypervisor (Headron, Beadrock Udo),
>>> Rust-Shyper, Bareflank-MicroV, and many other development efforts but it
>>> seems that Xen is the most advanced for my purposes here.
>>>
>>
>> You can have a disk-less (or ramdisk based) distro supporting Xen with
>> Alpine Linux (with Xen flavour). It does still use Dom0 with all its
>> responsibilities though.
>>
>>>>> Currently, I am investigating and researching the ideas of
>>>>> "Disaggregating" Dom0 and have the Xoar Xen patches ("Breaking Up is
>>>>> Hard to Do: Security and Functionality in a Commodity Hypervisor"
>>>>> 2011) available which were developed against version 22155 of
>>>>> xen-unstable. The Linux patches are against Linux with pvops
>>>>> 2.6.31.13 and developed on a standard Ubuntu 10.04 install. My effort
>>>>> would also be up update these patches.
>>>>>
>>>>> I have been able to locate the Xen "Dom0 Disaggregation"
>>>>> (https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Dom0_Disaggregation) am reading up
>>>>> on things now but wanted to ask the developers list about any
>>>>> experience you may have had in this area since the research objective
>>>>> is to integrate Xoar with the latest Xen 4.20, if possible, and to
>>>>> take it further to basically eliminate Dom0 all together with
>>>>> individual Mini-OS or Unikernel "Service and Driver VM's" instead
>>>>> that are loaded at UEFI boot time.
>>
>> The latest stuff going on I have in mind regarding this idea of moving
>> stuff out of Dom0 is QEMU as Unikernel (using Unikraft), there were some
>> discussions on this in Matrix and at Xen Summit, and it's currently work
>> in progress from Unikraft side.
>>
>> Teddy
>>
>>
>> Teddy Astie | Vates XCP-ng Intern
>>
>> XCP-ng & Xen Orchestra - Vates solutions
>>
>> web: https://vates.tech
>>
>


Teddy Astie | Vates XCP-ng Intern

XCP-ng & Xen Orchestra - Vates solutions

web: https://vates.tech