Xen Day Barcelona 2012

Xen Day Barcelona is a free morning of talks and interactive discussions people interested in Xen. A number of Xen core developers will be at Xen Day: this is your chance to ask them questions that you always wanted to ask. The event will be held on at LinuxCon Europe on Nov 8th, Hotel Fira Palace, Barcelona. To attend Xen Day, you do not need to register for LinuxCon. As spaces are limited, we do ask you to register for the Xen Day.

Agenda

Virtualization in the Cloud: Featuring Xen and XCP (Lars Kurth)

The Xen Hypervisor was built for the Cloud from the outset: when Xen was designed, we anticipated a world, which today is known as cloud computing. Today, Xen powers the largest clouds in production. This talk introduces Xen, XCP and introduces their architectures. The talk will shine some light challenges such as securing the cloud, and will introduce the concept of domain disaggregation as an approach to increase security, robustness and scalability. We will conclude with an update on exciting developments in the Xen community and their implications for building open source clouds.

Xen on ARM Cortex A15 (Ian Campbell, Xen Committer and Linux Maintainer)

During the last few months of 2011 the Xen Community started an effort to port Xen to ARMv7 and ARMv8 with virtualization extensions, using the Cortex A15 processor as reference platform.The new Xen port is exploiting this set of hardware capabilities to run guest VMs in the most efficient way possible while keeping the ARM specific changes to the hypervisor and the Linux kernel to a minimum.

Developing the new port we took the chance to remove legacy concepts like PV or HVM guests and only support a single kind of guests that is comparable to "PV on HVM" in the Xen X86 world.

This talk will explain the reason behind this and other design choices that we made during the early development process and it will go through the main technical challenges that we had to solve in order to accomplish our goal. Notable examples are the way Linux guests issue hypercalls and receive event channels notifications from Xen.

Xen 4.2 and xl (Ian Jackson, Xen Committer)

The Xen 4.2 release contains a production-ready version of the new libxl toolstack library and its "xl" domain management utility. We are recommending that everyone switch away from the obsolete and unmaintained xm/xend toolstack. In this presentation we will summarise the key differences, discuss how to do the upgrade, and (network permitting) do a short demo.

Xen Benchmarks (Roger Pau Monne, Xen Developer)

Presentation of results regarding benchmarks performed against KVM and Xen virtualization platforms. The benchmarks used to realize this comparison are based on workloads that try to mimic real uses of those products. Possible improvements to overcome the limitations found will also be discussed.

Meet the Xen Developers

This is an open session, that you can use to ask the Xen Developers any question you want. From solving concrete problems that you may have, to discussing the evolution of Xen.