OpenSolaris

Flag day: Solaris xVM

Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:02:05 +0100
From: John Levon <john.levon@sun.com>
To: on-all@eng.sun.com, onnv-gate@onnv.eng.sun.com
Subject: Flag day: Solaris xVM

Information for all gatelings
~-----------------------------

With the putback of:

    6551858 PSARC/2006/260 Solaris on Xen

Solaris Nevada now supports the xVM platform on x86 and x64 systems.

As a Solaris developer, para-virtualized Solaris on xVM constitutes a
new platform for x86, and thus you must test on this platform when
making relevant changes.

BFU has been updated to support xVM. You must use an updated BFU from
the gate as of this putback. You MUST also install the xVM packages if
you want to use xVM: see below.

This putback now requires at least snv_54 in order to build the ON gate.
If you see elfextract fail on a ZFS filesystem, then you'll know why.

As a reminder, you need to update your version of the Studio compilers
as described here:

http://svn.opensolaris.org/os/community/on/flag-days/pages/2007080202/
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/tools/sun_studio_tools/

Cap-Eye Install should not be used across this putback. Users do so at
their own risk. Use of Cap-Eye Install after a BFU or upgrade will work
as usual.

Developers with "full" workspaces *must* do a full (clobber) build with
nightly. Incremental builds will fail.

If you're a Teamware user: since there are deleted/renamed files,
existing gates should, as usual, do bringover from both usr AND
deleted_files.  Do a 'wx backup' before you begin just in case.

If you only have e.g. usr/src/uts in your workspace, you should do a
'make clobber' before bringover because x86 Makefiles and object files
have moved around a little and a post-bringover clobber will not find
some of the old objects otherwise.

When running guest operating systems, it your responsibility to
to protect against virus infection and abide by the security policies
that apply to your environment.

You may skip the rest of this message if you're not interested.

Introduction to OpenSolaris(TM) xVM
~-----------------------------------

The xVM project provides the ability to run multiple operating system
instances (domains) on the same hardware simultaneously, as well as a
number of other features; most notably "live migration", the ability to
move running domains between two physical systems without needing to
reboot them. The xVM hypervisor is only available on x86 and x64 systems
with this integration.

The xVM hypervisor is based on the work of the Xen community.  The name
'Xen' is a trademark with some restrictions, so we have chosen to use a
separate name to describe Sun's hypervisor.

Multiple para-virtualized Solaris Nevada domains are supported.
Unmodified versions of Solaris 10, Linux and Windows work in most cases
on systems containing AMD Virtualization. (AMD-V.) and Intel(R)
Virtualization (Intel(R) VT) technology; however full functionality for
such configurations is not included in this integration and will
integrate into a later version of Solaris Nevada.

For more background on xVM see:

    http://opensolaris.org/os/community/xen/docs/developers/

This project implements the following ARC cases:

ARC Case #                Case Title
~--------------            ~------------------------
PSARC/2006/260            Solaris on Xen
PSARC/2007/157            libvirt
PSARC/2007/155            IPv4 Network Config
PSARC/2007/109            libfsimage
PSARC/2007/128            SMF Services for Xen
PSARC/2007/437            Contract DKC_VBD to Solaris Install
PSARC/2007/497            SMF services for Xen addendum
PSARC/2007/498            SMF services for Xen addendum #2

The xVM gate
~------------

The xVM gate currently resides separately from the ON gate. On SWAN it
lives at /net/onnv.eng/export/xvm/ - you can find sunos.hg/README there
with full instructions. We are working on getting the gate out on
opensolaris.org as soon as we can.

Note that the changes to Solaris itself for xVM can be found in
onnv-gate as usual.

Getting the xVM packages
~------------------------

BFU has not (yet) been modified to install the new xVM packages that
contain the hypervisor, tools, commands etc.  If you use BFU to upgrade
your system and want to use xVM you must run the following script to
install the new xVM packages BEFORE running BFU:

    /net/onnv.eng/export/xvm/public/bin/update_xvm

When these packages are installed, a BFU to the ON gate bits will
install a new entry in the grub menu for booting xVM. If you fail to do
this, you'll have to add a grub entry by hand via "bootadm -m upgrade".

To use virt-install, you will need a recent (build 70 or later) version
of SUNWlxml-python.

Instructions on getting the packages for OpenSolaris users will be
forthcoming.

Contact
~-------

New bugster category and subcategorys have been created for filling bugs
related to the xVM platform. The responsible manager is
jerriann.meyer@sun.com.

      Prod/Cat/Subcat          Description
      ~---------------          ~-----------
      solaris/xvm/kernel       Solaris kernel on xVM bugs
      solaris/xvm/utility      xVM user-space tool bugs
      solaris/xvm/hypervisor   xVM hypervisor bugs

A list of common known problems you might hit can be found in the
developer's doc listed above.

If you have any questions or problems please send e-mail to:

    xen-discuss@opensolaris.org

SWAN users may also contact the team at xen-interest@sun.com, but are
strongly encouraged to use the OpenSolaris list unless it's unavoidable.

You can also join our chat room at:

    irc://irc.oftc.net/solaris-xen

or internally at #matrix-eng

Sincerely,

 - The Matrix team