Xen devel - May 2007 - XenSocket

At the recent Xen Summit held in April 2007, we introduced XenSocket - a 
reliable, very high 
throughput, interdomain transport mechanism. 

Our XenSocket solution is comprised of a sockets-based interface to a 
shared-memory-based 
transport, with the goal being to significantly improve throughput over 
that obtained when using 
TCP/IP for same system interdomain communication. 

We have had several requests for more detailed information about 
XenSocket, and also for 
access to the source code.

We have documented the XenSocket design and performance results in an IBM 
technical report, 
RC24247, which can be downloaded from:
http://domino.research.ibm.com/library/cyberdig.nsf/1e4115aea78b6e7c85256b360066f0d4/0f652cbf9ea1b2ee852572ce0060baba?OpenDocument

We are planning to make the source code available once we have ported to 
Xen 3.0.5, and 
completed a few features that have been requested. We also saw the note 
about XWay today, 
and Ian''s response. We agree with Ian that having an interdomain byte 
stream protocol available 
in Xen would be of great benefit to the community and hope our work on 
XenSocket and the work 
by the XWay team could make that happen. 

We welcome your feedback and questions. 
The contact for the XenSocket work is Suzanne McIntosh 
(skranjac@us.ibm.com).

_______________________________________________________________
Suzanne K. McIntosh
Secure Systems and Services, Internet Security Group
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Phone: 914-784-7357 (t/l 863) 
Email: skranjac@us.ibm.com
http://www.research.ibm.com





_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel

The lack of revocation seems to have influenced your design in several
ways:

1) You assume one end of the channel to be designated as more trusted
than the other.
2) Teardown seems to require cooperation between the domains.
3) You establish an asymmetrical rw mapping of the channel meta-data. 

If you had revocation, would you still have chosen the design points
above?  Is the lack of revocation a significant limitation or a
non-issue?



_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel