Xen Project Developer Summit: Full Schedule

9:00am BST

Welcome & Community Roundup - Lars Kurth, Citrix

Speakers

Lars Kurth

Director Open Source / Project Chairperson The Xen Project , Citrix Systems UK Ltd.

Lars Kurth is a highly effective, passionate community manager with strong experience of working with open source communities (Symbian, Symbian DevCo, Eclipse, GNU) and currently is the community manager for the Xen Project. Lars has 12 years of experience building and leading engineering... Read More →

Thursday October 24, 2013 9:00am - 9:15am BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Community

9:00am BST

Hack and Meeting Space

Thursday October 24, 2013 9:00am - 12:30pm BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Hack

9:15am BST

Xen Project Development Update - George Dunlap, Citrix

Includes other development updates, aka NUMA, FreeBSD, Xen and Libvirt.

Xen 4.3 was the first release with our new "release coordinator" role during the whole development cycle. This talk will review some ways in which the process worked well for 4.3, and some ways it could have been better, and then go on to talk about the 4.4 release.

Speakers

George Dunlap

Principle Software Engineer, Citrix Systems R&D UK Ltd

George Dunlap worked with the Xen project while a graduate student at the University of Michigan before receiving his PhD in 2006. He is currently working as Staff Software Engineer for Citrix on the open-source Xen team in Cambridge, England. He has done work in many areas of Xen... Read More →

Thursday October 24, 2013 9:15am - 10:30am BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Xen Project Update

10:30am BST

Break

Thursday October 24, 2013 10:30am - 11:00am BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

11:00am BST

HVM Dom0: Any unmodified OS as Dom0 - Will Auld, Intel

It should be great if we can use an unmodified guest for dom0 or the driver domain. We found a way to achieve that. Since Xen's inception, the first guest on Xen is always a para-virtualized domain, and it can be modified Linux, NetBSD, and Solaris etc. In this way, dom0 can achieve near-native performance, so it is commonly used in the server market. However, modifications to guest kernels also implies limitations. For example, it can't support Windows OS as the dom0 or the driver domain. With the rapid evolution of hardware-assisted virtualization (e.g. VMX, VT-d technologies), HVM domains also can achieve comparable performance with para-virtualization. And, it's high time for Xen to such an unmodified guest as the dom0. In the presentation, we discuss its architectural changes and its benefits compared with the traditional PV or HVM dom0, and we also introduce what we have done.

Speakers

Will Auld

Performance Architect, Principal Engineer, Intel

Thursday October 24, 2013 11:00am - 11:30am BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

New Features

11:30am BST

"Unlimited" Event Channels - David Vrabel, Citrix

Event Channels are Xen's mechanism for paravirtualized interrupts. These were limited to only 4096 which then limits the number of guests that a host may support to around 300 to 500. This presentation will give a brief introduction to event channels, a detailed look at the new, innovative FIFO-based event channel ABI that increases the limit to over 100,000 as well as having several other useful features (e.g., multiple priorties). Some of the key performance measurments of the new ABI will be shown.

Speakers

David Vrabel

Amazon

David Vrabel is a member of the XenServer Engineering team at Citrix and spends most of his time on Linux kernel and Xen development. He is also a co-maintainer for the Xen (x86) subsystem in the Linux kernel.

Thursday October 24, 2013 11:30am - 12:00am BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Scalability/Performance

12:00pm BST

On Paravirualizing TCP: Congestion Control on Xen VMs - Luwei Cheng, Student, University of Hong Kong

While datacenters are increasingly adopting VMs to provide elastic cloud services, they still rely on traditional TCP for congestion control. In this talk, I will first show that VM scheduling delays can heavily contaminate RTTs sensed by VM senders, preventing TCP from correctly learning the physical network condition. Focusing on the incast problem, which is commonly seen in large-scale distributed data processing such as MapReduce and web search, I find that the solutions that have been developed for *physical* clusters fall short in a Xen *virtual* cluster. Second, I will provide a concrete understanding of the problem, and reveal that the situations that when the sending VM is preempted versus when the receiving VM is preempted, are different. Third, I will introduce my recent attempts on paravirtualizing TCP to overcome the negative effect caused by VM scheduling delays.

Speakers

Luwei Cheng

PhD student, Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong

I am a 2nd-year PhD student, in Department of Computer Science, the University of Hong Kong. My research interest is mainly about virtualization technologies for cloud computing, including but not limited to VM scheduling, I/O models, and guest OS design. I have been using/researching... Read More →

Thursday October 24, 2013 12:00pm - 12:30pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Scalability/Performance

12:30pm BST

Lunch

Thursday October 24, 2013 12:30pm - 1:45pm BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

1:45pm BST

BoF Announcements

Thursday October 24, 2013 1:45pm - 2:00pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

BoF

2:00pm BST

Test-as-a-Service and XenRT - Alex Brett, Citrix

In this presentation, Alex Brett will show how Citrix has constructed a Test-as-a-Service environment which is used by the wider XenServer engineering team, highlighting the benefits the approach provides, together with an introduction to the (recently open sourced) XenRT automation framework which powers it, and discuss how this could be applied within the Xen Project community.

Speakers

Alex Brett

Citrix

Alex Brett is a Staff Software Engineer in the XenServer QA team at Citrix Systems, working on the XenRT test automation framework.

Thursday October 24, 2013 2:00pm - 2:30pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Development Tools

2:00pm BST

BoF: GlusterFS Integration: libgfapi and the block device translator, John Mark Walker, RedHat

Running through the QEMU/KVM integration with libgfapi and the block device translator to see if there are any potential parallels to Xen hypervisor integration

Speakers

John Mark Walker

Open Source Ecosystems Leader, Red Hat, Inc

John Mark is the ManageIQ Community Leader. For three years prior to his ManageIQ role, he was the Gluster Community Leader and is a long-time Open Source community advocate and strategist.

Thursday October 24, 2013 2:00pm - 2:45pm BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

BoF

2:30pm BST

"osstest" Xen testing system - Ian Jackson, Citrix

osstest is the system which does the Xen.org automatic tests of Xen. The push gates, which try to prevent important regressions from reaching the main stable and evelopment trees, are managed by osstest.

In this talk I will give a brief overview of the system, focussed on how to add new tests.

Speakers

Ian Jackson

Xen Committer, Citrix

Ian is a longstanding contributor to the Xen Project, working for Citrix as Xen committer, maintainer, security team member, CI system owner, etc. Ian's other interests include a strong connection to the Debian Project.

Thursday October 24, 2013 2:30pm - 2:45pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Development Tools

2:45pm BST

Zero-copy display of guest framebuffers using GEM - John Baboval, Citrix

The current state-of-the-art in displaying guest video is to copy pixel data from domU memory into a buffer in the device model domain, and then to render the display using something like X, or VNC. The quantity of data copied is partially mitigated by dirty page tracking. However when using the VM to play video or other other tasks that require frequent full-screen updates, copying is a significant drag on system performance and power consumption. By using the DRM subsystem in dom0 on systems with a unified memory architecture, it is possible to make arbitrary pages available for direct scanout by the graphics hardware. The in-kernel graphics drivers make this relatively straight forward and maintainable. This presentation explains how the current display path works, and how to use DRM to improve it.

Speakers

John Baboval

Citrix

John Baboval is Principal Software Engineer at Citrix. John is working on XenClient and has worked on Graphics Virtualization, Power Management and Paravirtualized devices and drivers. John is also the maintainer of QEMU based device models for XenClient.

Thursday October 24, 2013 2:45pm - 3:15pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Graphics and Audio

2:45pm BST

BoF: "osstest" coding sessions - Ian Jackson, Citrix

Hands-on osstest coding session

Speakers

Ian Jackson

Xen Committer, Citrix

Thursday October 24, 2013 2:45pm - 3:45pm BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

BoF

3:15pm BST

Virtual Disk Integrity in Real Time - JP Blake, Assured Information Security & Chris Rogers, Student at SUNY Binghamton

This paper introduces the Virtual Disk Integrity in Real Time (vDIRT) monitor, a mechanism to measure virtual hard disks in real time from the Dom0 trusted computing base. vDIRT is an improvement over traditional methods for auditing file integrity which rely on a service in a potentially compromised host. It also overcomes the limitations of existing methods for assuring disk integrity that are coarse grained and do not scale to large disks. vDIRT is a capability to measure disk reads and writes in real time, allowing for fine grained tracking of sectors within files, as well as the overall disk. The vDIRT implementation and its impact on performance is discussed to show that disk operation monitoring from Dom0 is practical.

Speakers

JP Blake

Assured Information Security

JP Blake is a researcher at Assured Information Security in Rome, NY. His work focuses on trusted computing, Xen, and XenClient XT. Chris Rogers is a masters student at SUNY Binghamton.

Chris Rogers

Chris Rogers is a masters student at SUNY Binghamton.

Thursday October 24, 2013 3:15pm - 3:45pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Security

3:45pm BST

Break

Thursday October 24, 2013 3:45pm - 4:15pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

4:15pm BST

PVH Technical Deep Dive, George Dunlap, Citrix

PVH is a new guest type that is designed to take the best features of both PV and HVM guests. This talk will be a technical deep-dive: explaining exactly which features of HVM and PV guests are used, and which ones are discarded, and why. The primary goal will be to inform developers about the details of PVH to make it easier for them to interact with the code.

Speakers

George Dunlap

Principle Software Engineer, Citrix Systems R&D UK Ltd

Thursday October 24, 2013 4:15pm - 4:45pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

New Features

4:15pm BST

BoF Slot 3

Thursday October 24, 2013 4:15pm - 5:00pm BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

BoF

4:45pm BST

Gnome outreach: Destination Xen - Elena Ufimtseva

In this talk I plan to describe my first impression from working on
open source project, how the community is organized and what can be gained by contributing to open source community. As a supporting fact of positive outcome from participating in similar projects, I will provide an example from my personal experience. It demonstrates how anyone can dive into open source development and work on project of choice. I introduce my work on virtual NUMA within XenProject and OPW program. It will demonstrate the challenges that newbie will face diving into mature development product and process, the necessity of discipline, commitment and self-organization. I will show what I had to learn in order to move forward, what I had to focus on and how to progress. The work what was done at this moment would not be possible without help of project mentors, source code knowledge, learning how to extract information from patches and ask right questions. I hope this example will bring more passionate developers into the community of open source software and hacking.

Speakers

Elena Ufimtseva

Software Engineer, Oracle

I am a former OPW intern of 2013 program and my project was vNUMA work for Xen hypervisor. After OPW I realized that I like to continue to contribute to Xen Project and Linux kernel. I had given a talk at 2013 LinuxCon in Europe and at Xen Project summit of the same year about my... Read More →

Thursday October 24, 2013 4:45pm - 5:00pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Community

5:00pm BST

Increasing XenServer's VM density, Jonathan Davies, Citrix

As the number of CPU cores in server-class hardware increases, the demand on a virtualisation platform increases for greater VM density. Most commercial virtualisation platforms now support several hundred VMs per host. This talk will describe the scalability challenges that were overcome in Citrix XenServer 6.2 to enable support for up to 500 fully virtualised or 650 paravirtualised VMs per host. These include limits with event channels, blktap, xenstored and consoled. It will also discuss how dom0 CPU utilisation was reduced in order to make a large number of VMs responsive and thus usable, and will present benchmark measurements quantifying these improvements.

Speakers

Jonathan Davies

Citrix

Jonathan is the System Performance Lead for XenServer at Citrix. His responsibilities include optimisation of performance and scalability. Has presented at international academic conferences.

Thursday October 24, 2013 5:00pm - 5:30pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Scalability/Performance

5:00pm BST

BoF: PV Audio on Xen, Stefano Panella, Citrix

Developing a good PV audio solution for Xen is not as simple as it seems. On Xen the audio data bandwidth is not a problem, but the synchronization and the Real Time nature of a real audio card is difficult to workaround. Stefano Panella would like to share some lessons learned developing a PV Audio solution compatible with linux and windows guests, showing the differences in the required guest API (alsa driver for linux, WaveCyclic and WaveRT drivers for Windows). Using a PV audio solution it would be possible to have Acoustic Echo Cancellation working, difficult to achieve with a pure audio emulation. Stefano would also like to discuss about what would be needed to upstream a PV Audio solution, which would involve changes in Xen, qemu and linux.

Speakers

Stefano Panella

Stefano Panella comes from an embedded programming background and has previously worked on wireless technologies and graphic remoting. He is currently working for Citrix in the XenClient team and he is leading the development in the audio subsystem on Xen. Stefano has also done some... Read More →

Thursday October 24, 2013 5:00pm - 6:00pm BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

BoF

5:30pm BST

Open Source Citrix Windows PV Drivers - Paul Durrant, Citrix

Citrix has recently spent several months making sure all the key parts of XenServer are open source. Part of this effort made the XenServer Windows Paravirtual (PV) drivers available in source form under a BSD 2 clause license on GitHub.

Building these drivers outside of the internal Citrix XenServer build environment was quite hard and the resulting binaries would only run correctly in a XenServer host environment.
I have recently spent many weeks modifying the drivers so that they should work on any recent upstream Xen host environment thus making it much easier for anyone outside of Citrix to build and deploy the drivers. I would therefore like to give a brief tour of all the drivers, their source, what each of them does, and how they all interact. I will also discuss plans for posting signed versions of these drivers onto Windows Update for general use by the community.

Speakers

Paul Durrant

Principal Hypervisor Engineer, Amazon

Paul Durrant is a Principal Hypervisor Engineer in the Amazon Web Services EC2 team based in Cambridge, UK.

Thursday October 24, 2013 5:30pm - 6:00pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Xen Server

6:30pm BST

Evening Reception

Join fellow attendees for dinner and drinks at Hyde Out. This is a great opportunity to relax, network with fellow attendees, continue conversations outside of the conference center, and see a bit of the local area!

Thursday October 24, 2013 6:30pm - 9:30pm BST
Hyde Out

9:00am BST

Xen on ARM Update - Stefano Stabellini, Citrix

Many significant improvements have been made to Xen and Linux for the ARM architecture since September 2012, when initial support for Xen on ARM was introduced in the kernel. The number of contributors considerably increased as the number of different companies behind them. Xen on ARM has become a true multivendor project. Today Linux 3.11 can run on Xen on ARM as a DomU or Dom0, 32-bit or 64-bit, with one or more CPUs. Xen 4.3, out since July 2013, is the first hypervisor release to support ARMv7 and ARMv8 platforms. This talk will discuss the current status of the project, the principal technical advancements achieved during the last year of development and the problems still left unsolved. It will relate the experience of porting Xen to many new ARM SoCs and working with multiple hardware vendors in the ARM ecosystem, within and outside the Linaro Enterprise working Group.

Speakers

Stefano Stabellini

Principal Engineer, Xilinx

Stefano Stabellini serves as system software architect and virtualization lead at Xilinx, the world's largest supplier of FPGA solutions. Previously, at Aporeto, he created a virtualization-based security solution for containers and authored several security articles. As Senior Principal... Read More →

Friday October 25, 2013 9:00am - 9:30am BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Xen Project Update

9:30am BST

Status Update of COLO Project - Xiaowei Yang, Huawei and Will Auld, Intel

We have presented the idea of coarse grain lock-stepping (COLO) virtual machiens for non-stop service in last year's xen summit. We have made significant progress in the past year and submitted the patch series to the community. It is a good time for us to present the latest status to the community and call for participation.

Speakers

Will Auld

Performance Architect, Principal Engineer, Intel

Xiaowei Yang

Xiaowei Yang, Huawei. Xiaowei is an architect of Huawei Virtualzation Platform. He is responsible for the technical development of virutalization projects.

Friday October 25, 2013 9:30am - 10:00am BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

High Availability

9:30am BST

Dual-Android on Nexus 10, Lovene Bhatia, Samsung

Samsung will present the challenges of creating a dual-Android platform on the Nexus 10 using Xen on ARM. Running two copies of Android is a strong use-case to satisfy the security needs for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), where one Android can be designated as “work” and is secure and isolated from the users “home” Android. Achieving a good user-experience in both Android is essential for this technology to succeed commercially. The Nexus 10 has ARM Cortex A15 processors. For a good user-experience, both Android need high-performance GPU-accelerated graphics which demand high throughput and low latency. Samsung will discuss the issues encountered using Xen on a mobile device in this demanding use-case, and how the changes for Xen for mobile can be contributed into the community.

Speakers

Lovene Bhatia

Samsung

I am working for Samsung Electronics in Samsung Research UK (SRUK). Samsung has been working on Xen on ARM for many years, leading the Xen A9 project. SRUK is researching using Xen on mobile devices on ARM A15 processors.

Friday October 25, 2013 9:30am - 10:00am BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Mobile

10:00am BST

Xen in OSS based In–Vehicle Infotainment Systems, Artem Mygaiev, GlobalLogic

Xen role, details of implementation and problems in a sample solution based on OSS (Android, Linux and Xen) that addresses Automotive requirements such as ultra-fast RVC boot time, quick IVI system boot time, cloud connectivity and multimedia capabilities, reliability and security through hardware virtualization. Secure CAN/LIN/MOST bus integration handled by Linux on Dom0 while Android runs customizable QML-based HMI in a sandbox of DomU. These case studies will include but not be limited to: computing power requirements, memory requirements, virtualization, stability, boot-time sequence and optimization, video clips showing results of the work done. Case study is built on TexasInstruments OMAP5 SoC.

Speakers

Artem Mygaiev

GlobalLogic

Mr. Mygaiev is holding the position of Associate VP in GlobalLogic Inc. and responsible for Embedded Software domain in Ukrainian branch of GlobalLogic. He has accumulated over eleven years of hardware engineering and embedded software development experience in wired and wireless... Read More →

Friday October 25, 2013 10:00am - 10:30am BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

New Virtualization use-case

10:00am BST

Mirage OS & XAPI project update, Anil M, Cambridge University and Jonatham Ludlam, Citrix

The creation of the Linux Foundation Labs Xen Project has been a big step forward for the Xen hypervisor community. But the Xen hypervisor isn't the only project that's been accepted into the Linux Foundation: The Xapi Project is the umbrella project for the open development of the
Xapi Toolstack, the set of software that powers XenServer and XCP. In this talk a status update for the project will be given, discussing therelationship between the Xapi project and the newly forming XenServer development community and the convergence of XCP and XenServer. The use of libraries and technology co-developed with the Mirage project will be highlighted.

Mirage is a unikernel that allows us to build applications which can be compiled to very diverse environments: the same code can be linked to run as a regular Unix app, relinked to run as a FreeBSD kernel module, and also linked into a self-contained kernel which can run on the Xen hypervisor.

Since the talk last year, we have developed around 40 new libraries that implement significant stub domain functionality; vchan, blkfront/netfront that compile in UNIX *and* Xen with similar interfaces, a message switch
that coordinates fault-tolerant communication, and an interactive fbdev. In a nutshell, it makes moving to stub domains practical where previously it was for single VM appliances. As part of this effort, we have also identified several possible improvements in hypervisor interfaces.

We would also like to announce the first 1.0 public release here!

Speakers

Jonathan Ludlam

Jon Ludlam works as an Architect and Dev Lead at Citrix and has worked on XenServer and in particular the Xapi project for the last 6 years. He is also an external partner at the OCaml Labs, and spoke on XCP atXenSummit 2010.

Anil Madhavapeddy

Senior Research Fellow, University of Cambridge

Anil Madhavapeddy is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, based in the Systems Research Group. He was on the original team that developed the Xen hypervisor, and helped develop an industry-leading cloud management toolstack written entirely in OCaml. This XenServer... Read More →

Friday October 25, 2013 10:00am - 10:30am BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Xen Project Update

10:30am BST

Break

Friday October 25, 2013 10:30am - 11:00am BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

11:00am BST

Performance Optimization on Xen-based Android Device, Jack Ren, Intel and Xiantao Zhang, Intel

Mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets, are becoming de-facto everyday computing and communication devices, virtualization can bring additional benfits to mobile devices for both security and manageability. IT department may use hypervisor, as a highly secure solution, to manage autherized mobile devices, such as for network traffic monitoring, filtering, scan (for virus detection), and/or OS update/patching even when the guest OS becomes completely dead. We insert Xen to the mobile OS Android to deprivilege Android as guest for security and manageability purpose. However, the usage case of mobile device is quit different with that of server, for example mobile devices runs completely different benchmarks (mostly multimedia focused) vs. that in server (mostly responsiveness focused). We analyze the gap of Xen as a mobile hypervisor and present how we improve the performance.

Speakers

Jack Ren

Software Architect, Intel

Jack worked for10+ years in embedded system, including cellphone, tablet, smart devices, wearables, with very strong system level knowledge and experiences, from the lowlevel BSP and operating system to the high level software stack, including runtime, compiler, application framework... Read More →

Xiantao Zhang

Xiantao Zhang is the senior engineer & engineer manager of virtualization team from Intel Open Source Technology Center, and has been working on Xen since 2005. Xiantao has worked on various areas in virtualization, including Xen/IA64 support, interrupt virtualization, IOMMU, nested... Read More →

Friday October 25, 2013 11:00am - 11:30am BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Mobile

11:00am BST

Xenserver-core: What it is, how it is built and how to get involved, Euan Harris, Citrix

XenServer is open source and freely available, but it is packaged as an appliance image which must be installed on dedicated hardware. xenserver-core repackages the core components of XenServer so they can easily be built and installed on a standard Linux distribution. Its main goals are: * to make it easy to download, modify and build XenServer components, or just learn how they work; * to help upstream distributions to include up-to-date XenServer packages; * to provide an environment for experimentation. This talk will explain the motivations behind xenserver-core and how it relates to the open-sourcing of XenServer. For developers, it will cover how to get the code, how to build it and how to contribute back to the project. For packagers, it will explain the project's development and release processes and what an upstream maintainer can expect from it.

Speakers

Euan Harris

Citrix

Euan Harris is an engineer at Citrix, where he works on OpenStack, the XenServer toolstack and xenserver-core. He has been particularly involved in building and packaging xenserver-core.Prior speaking experience: academic conferences/seminars, graduate recruiting events

Friday October 25, 2013 11:00am - 11:30am BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Xen Server

11:30am BST

SecureServe: A Multi-level Secure Server Virtualization Platform on Xen, Jason Sonnek, Adventium Labs

Due to the rapid shift toward cloud computing, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and thin client computing, many organizations in the government desire a high assurance, multi-level secure server virtualization platform that is low-cost, open and enterprise ready. In this presentation, Jason Sonnek will present SecureServe, a recently launched effort to develop such a platform by building on the open-source Citrix XenServer. The SecureServe project will draw upon research in a number of areas, including dom0 disaggregation, Xen Security Modules mandatory access controls and static/dynamic attestation. In this presentation, Jason will describe the project objectives and requirements, the project's relation to Citrix XenClient XT and XenServer Windsor, current development status and plans for moving forward.

Speakers

Jason Sonnek

Adventium Labs

Mr. Jason Sonnek is a principal research scientist at Adventium Labs, a research lab in Minneapolis, MN. His interests include virtualization, cloud computing, operating systems and computer security. His current research is primarily focused on leveraging virtualization to build... Read More →

Friday October 25, 2013 11:30am - 12:00am BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Security

11:30am BST

Performance Evaluation of Live Migration based on Xen ARM PVH, Jaeyong Yoo, Samsung

Electricity charge for operating data centers is reaching approximately 27% of total operation cost. For this reason, ARM servers have been getting more attention for future energy-efficient data centers and the performance of ARM processors keeps increasing (i.e., almost 3GHz). For efficiently utilizing ARM cores, ARM PVH has been introduced in Xen 4.3, and based on this, we have implemented live migration feature and evaluated on top of dualcore ARM board. More specifically, we choose multimedia streaming workload, measure the maximum concurrent clients, and calculate clients per watt (CPW) as the performance metric. From this, we have found out that even dualcore ARM processor (with virtualization) gives higher CPW (7 CPW) over x86 case (6 CPW). In addition we could reduce the energy consumption around 70% (4-to-1 consolidation for low-loaded servers) by using server consolidation.

Speakers

Jaeyong Yoo

Samsung

Jaeyong Yoo received M.S. and Ph.D. in Networked Computing Systems Lab. in GIST, Korea, in 2006 and 2012, respectively. From 2012, he has joined Cloud OS Lab. in Software center, Samsung Electronics. In Cloud OS Lab. he is one of the members of ARM virtualization project and working... Read More →

Friday October 25, 2013 11:30am - 12:00pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Scalability/Performance

12:00pm BST

Erlang on Xen: Redefining the Software Stack, Viktor Sovietov

Today the software stack inside cloud instances closely follows the traditional pattern, the pattern optimised for a completely different settings. The emerging OS-less software technologies promise to radically simplify the software inside virtual servers. Erlang on Xen is one of such technologies. It is a highly-compatible reimplementation of the Erlang VM that run directly on Xen. The super-elastic services based on Erlang on Xen adhere to 7 'commandments': 1) Do not assume the presence of OS underneath; 2) Software must be oblivious to boundaries of physical nodes 3) All services share the same auto-scalable infrastructure 4) Run computations near the data they process 5) Child nodes get configuration from the parent only 6) Avoid “administration” at all costs 7) SMP is abomination of cloud computing.

Speakers

Viktor Sovietov

CEO, Cloudozer LLP

Viktor Sovietov is the architect and strategist in Erlang On Xen project. Viktor has two decades of IT experience and is an entrepreneur who has founded a number of software companies specialising in distributed and parallel processing and management as well as in artificial inte... Read More →

Friday October 25, 2013 12:00pm - 12:30pm BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Cloud Computing

12:00pm BST

Enabling Fast, Dynamic Network Processing with ClickOS, Joao Martins, NEC

While virtualization technologies like Xen have been around for a long time, it is only in recent years that they have started to be targeted as viable systems for implementing middlebox processing (e.g., firewalls, NATs). But can they provide this functionality while yielding the high performance expected from hardware-based middlebox offerings? In this talk Joao Martins will introduce ClickOS, a tiny, MiniOS-based virtual machine tailored for network processing. In addition to the vm itself, Joao Martins will describe performance improvements done to the entire Xen I/O pipe. Finally, Joao Martins will discuss an evaluation showing that ClickOS can be instantiated in 30 msecs, can process traffic at 10Gb/s for almost all packet sizes, introduces delay of 40 microseconds and can run middleboxes at rates of 5 Mp/s.

Speakers

Joao Martins

NEC

NEC Europe Ltd. established the NEC Laboratories Europe in 1994. Today, the laboratories are located in Heidelberg, Germany and Acton, UK. Research and development functions are integrated into the same organization to shorten the time to market of cutting-edge ICT technologies. Ongoing... Read More →

Friday October 25, 2013 12:00pm - 12:30pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

New Virtualization use-case

12:30pm BST

Lunch

Friday October 25, 2013 12:30pm - 1:45pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

1:45pm BST

BoF Announcement

Friday October 25, 2013 1:45pm - 2:00pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

BoF

2:00pm BST

Delivering continuous deployment of xen-api at cloud scale, John Garbutt, Rackspace

Currently xen-api is really only installed today as part of XenServer. It has traditional enterprise style releases, with controlled upgrades and hotfixes when required.

When deploying OpenStack Rackspace, with the help of the OpenStack community, have adopted an approach where any check-in could be deployed, and the system upgraded, from any other checkin from that last release, or earlier in the current release.

It would be interesting to see if xen-api could move towards a model. At a minimum having more regular check points where an upgrade would be possible.

When running a cloud, a very small amount of control plane downtime is possible, but ideally there should be zero downtime for user's virtual machines. We should explore the ability to only upgrade Xen as a last resort, but still be able to update as much the control and data plane as possible, while keeping VMs alive.

Speakers

John Garbutt

Principal Engineer, Rackspace

John is currently a Principal Engineer at Rackspace, Nova PTL for the Liberty and Mitaka releases, and has been involved with OpenStack as a Software Developer since late 2010. He started with Citrix's Project Olympus private cloud packaging of OpenStack, and soon after working upstream... Read More →

Friday October 25, 2013 2:00pm - 2:30pm BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Cloud Computing

2:00pm BST

In-Guest Mechanism to Strengthen Guest Separation, Philip Tricca, Citrix

Terms related to security like 'disaggregation' and 'stubdom' have found their way into the standard Xen vernacular. Implementations of these architectures still require heavy lifting but examples have made their way into both the open source and commercial products. In this talk Philip presents a lesser known but complimentary method to confine QEMU processes using SELinux type enforcement. This architecture alone is interesting but Philip believes its utility extends beyond QEMU and SELinux. Future problems like inter-VM communication mechanisms hold unique challenges with regard to access control and policy semantics. Philip will argue that an approach influenced by sVirt and user-space object managers will be useful here. As always, attendees should expect tangents into abstract topics like the nature of trust and the utopic world that strong security mechanisms will bring about.

Speakers

Philip Tricca

Platform Architect, Intel

Philip is a platform architect in Intel's platform security division working to enable use of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and SGX in open source. Recently Phil has taken over maintainership of Intel's implementation of the TPM2 software stack and has been obsessing over system... Read More →

Friday October 25, 2013 2:00pm - 2:30pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Security

2:30pm BST

BoF: XAPI, continous deployment and OpenStack, John Garbutt, Rackspace

Speakers

John Garbutt

Principal Engineer, Rackspace

Friday October 25, 2013 2:30pm - 3:00pm BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

BoF

2:30pm BST

Multiple Device Emulators for HVM Guests, Paul Durrant, Citrix

Currently Xen only allows a single device emulator to be attached to each HVM guest in a system and, to date,
this has been QEMU generally running as a process in the same domain as the toolstack, or in a stub domain.

To enable the deployment of virtual GPUs to HVM guests in XenServer, patches were created to allow multiple device emulators to be attached to each HVM guest. QEMU continues to be used to emulate the majority of the devices, but a second process is spawned to handle the virtual GPU. This opens up the possibility of the GPU vendors supplying 'appliance' driver domains in future.

I'd like to give an overview of the changes that we've made to Xen and QEMU to enable the use of multiple emulators, the potential benefits to driver domains, plus the knock on effect of emulator disaggregation on the 'unplug' protocol and what we could do about this.

Speakers

Paul Durrant

Principal Hypervisor Engineer, Amazon

Paul Durrant is a Principal Hypervisor Engineer in the Amazon Web Services EC2 team based in Cambridge, UK.

Friday October 25, 2013 2:30pm - 3:00pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Graphics and Audio

3:00pm BST

BoF Slot 6

Friday October 25, 2013 3:00pm - 3:45pm BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

BoF

3:00pm BST

XenGT: A software based Intel Graphics Virtualization Solution, Haitao Shan, Intel

GPU virtualization has become an increasingly important requirement for client virtualization and cloud. Significant challenges exists realizing the multiplexing of graphics, media and compute workloads from multiple VMs and achieving the goals of being fully functional, high performance and secure. In this presentation, we will first review existing graphics virtualization technologies, and then introduce how XenGT - an open source solution from Intel - approaches differently. Broad functionality and good performance is achieved by accelerating the native OS graphics stack in each VM with minimum hypervisor intervention. A software mediator ensures the secure multiplexing of workloads from the multiple VMs by managing the scheduling of VMs on the GPU and controlling access to privileged resources and operations.

Speakers

Haitao Shan

Intel

Haitao joined Intel from April 2007, after graduation from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Haitao had worked as a Xen developer, Parallels technical supporter inside Intel. Working area covers most of VT related features. Currently, Haitao is a manager, managing the graphics virtualization... Read More →

Friday October 25, 2013 3:00pm - 3:45pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Graphics and Audio

3:45pm BST

Break

Friday October 25, 2013 3:45pm - 4:15pm BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

4:15pm BST

Perf Support in Xen, Boris Ostrovsky, Oracle

Hardware performance monitoring facilities such as counters can provide invaluable information about system behavior. In recent years, Linux 'perf' has become the standard tool for managing these facilities and interpreting data that they generate. In this talk we will discuss changes to Xen and Linux that will allow PV guests (including dom0) use perf for profiling themselves and, in the case of dom0, the hypervisor.

Speakers

Boris Ostrovsky

Oracle

Boris Ostrovsky is currently at Oracle working on various Linux and Xen projects.

Friday October 25, 2013 4:15pm - 4:45pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Development Tools

4:15pm BST

BoF: Bootstrapping an Android on Xen and Embedded eco-system

Speakers

Lars Kurth

Director Open Source / Project Chairperson The Xen Project , Citrix Systems UK Ltd.

Friday October 25, 2013 4:15pm - 5:15pm BST
Kilsyth Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

BoF

4:45pm BST

Xen and XenServer Storage Performance, Felipe Franciosi, Citrix

The development of low latency storage media such as modern Solid State Drives (SSD) brings new challenges to virtualisation platforms. For the first time, we are witnessing storage back ends which are so fast that the CPU time spent in processing data significantly impacts the delivered throughput. This is aggravated by CPU speeds remaining largely constant while storage solutions get faster by orders of magnitude. To meet user demands and fully exploit SSD performance under Xen, new technologies are necessary. This talk will discuss the Xen storage virtualisation data path when using various back ends (e.g. blkback, tapdisk, qemu). It will explain why it is hard to exploit SSD performance with current technologies and present measurement data for a variety of workloads. Finally, it will show how techniques such as persistent grants and indirect I/O can help to mitigate the problem.

Speakers

Felipe Franciosi

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Nutanix

Felipe is a Senior Staff Software Engineer working for Nutanix since 2015, more specifically leading the engineering efforts of the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV). He brings nearly 20 years of expertise in storage performance and virtualisation. This includes four years at Citrix working... Read More →

Friday October 25, 2013 4:45pm - 5:15pm BST
Moorfoot Hall Edinburgh International Conference Centre

Scalability/Performance