Hello, I''m a grad student working at University of Michigan in computer architecture. I''m writing to open up the idea that instrumentation of the xvm would be extremely useful tool for the research community. Those of us interested in virtualization are very interested in monitoring the behavior of these systems and with low engineering effort! I was hoping to get feedback on the feasibility of such a feature in the future for solaris to support this. Certainly, the hypervisor would need to allow such communication which may be a bit of a security/virtualization concern. Being able to use dtrace on the LDom hypervisor would be awesome, but is it even possible? Certainly this would mean some effort in the firmware.... -David -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
Sun mentioned that one of the benefits of xVM is that it allows technologies in Solaris to be used with Xen. Things like DTrace, ZFS, Predictive Self-Healing are good examples. I googled and found this page, not sure if you have read it before or not: http://blogs.sun.com/michaelh/entry/xvm_server_dtrace_fma Rayson On 2/15/08, David Meisner <meisner at umich.edu> wrote:> I''m a grad student working at University of Michigan in computer architecture. I''m writing to open up the idea that instrumentation of the xvm would be extremely useful tool for the research community. Those of us interested in virtualization are very interested in monitoring the behavior of these systems and with low engineering effort! I was hoping to get feedback on the feasibility of such a feature in the future for solaris to support this. Certainly, the hypervisor would need to allow such communication which may be a bit of a security/virtualization concern. Being able to use dtrace on the LDom hypervisor would be awesome, but is it even possible? Certainly this would mean some effort in the firmware.... > > > -David > > > -- > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > dtrace-discuss mailing list > dtrace-discuss at opensolaris.org >
http://blogs.sun.com/michaelh/entry/xvm_server_dtrace_fma Is the only reference I''ve found. It gives some info about xen. But, LDoms use the hardware hypervisor which can''t be touched. As far as I know... -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
Is xVM''s "dom0" the basic same thing as LDOM''s control domain? If so, someone should be able to do something similar in LDOMs for the control domain. Chip David Meisner wrote:> http://blogs.sun.com/michaelh/entry/xvm_server_dtrace_fma > > Is the only reference I''ve found. It gives some info about xen. But, LDoms use the hardware hypervisor which can''t be touched. As far as I know... > > > -- > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > dtrace-discuss mailing list > dtrace-discuss at opensolaris.org > >
On 2/15/08, David Meisner <meisner at umich.edu> wrote:> But, LDoms use the hardware hypervisor which can''t be touched. As far as I know...SPARC Hypervisor/LDom is *code* that runs in the Hyper-Privileged execution mode, which was introduced in the sun4v architecture. You can get the specification of the sun4v architecture at OpenSPARC. (I did not study the Hyper-Privileged execution mode in detail, but I assume it is very similar to the AMD-V or IVT... it''s basically a "ring -1" mode.) (BTW, I wrote the "Logical Domains" wikipedia page early last year, but unless the architecture of LDom changed a lot, it should still be valid) Some useful stuff: 1) Logical Domains (LDoms) http://opensolaris.org/os/community/ldoms/files/LDoms-LOSUG-Oct-2007.pdf 2) Hyperprivileged Mode http://www.opensparc.net/opensparc-t2/index.html http://opensparc-t1.sunsource.net/index.html Rayson> > > -- > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > dtrace-discuss mailing list > dtrace-discuss at opensolaris.org >
On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 01:00:14PM -0800, David Meisner wrote:> I''m a grad student working at University of Michigan in computer > architecture. I''m writing to open up the idea that instrumentation of > the xvm would be extremely useful tool for the research community.Hi David, we (the xVM team) are actively exploring the ways in which we can instrument the xVM system as a whole and the hypervisor in particular. It''s something we intend to bring up for discussion at dtrace.conf - so if you''re interested, that''d be a great place, though I understand it might be a stretch to make it out to SF. We''ve already done a fair amount of work on this, but there''s certainly more to do... regards john