Virtual Xen: Using Linux/KVM to host Xen guests without them noticing.

This talk looks at what it means to be a “Xen guest”, and how we emulate the Xen environment in KVM and QEMU to support customer virtual machines that still think they’re running under real Xen.

It will cover the initial detection of Xen through CPUID, the Xen “event channel” mechanism for interrupts, important hypercalls and enlightenments that a guest uses, XenStore and the paravirtualised disk and network devices.

David WOODHOUSE

David WOODHOUSE

Amazon

David is a Principal Engineer in Amazon’s Kernel and Operating System team, working on Linux and Xen to support Amazon EC2.

David started hacking on Linux in 1995 when he was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. He has since worked at Red Hat, and in Intel’s Open Source Technology Centre.

David was the primary developer of the Linux MTD subsystem for flash memory, and the JFFS2 flash file system. He also wrote the OpenConnect VPN client amongst other random distractions.