[XenARM] Release of xen-pxa270-qemu

[ROSSIER Daniel <Daniel.Rossier@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

 

I released the v1.0 (27apr-2009) of xen-pxa270-qemu on EmbeddedXEN sourceforge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/embeddedxen)

 

xen-pxa270-qemu intends to be a fully integrated Linux-based tree including the XEN hypervisor and miniOS. In a future release, it will also includes the Xenomai hard realtime extension, as a  particular domain U.

 

xen-colibri-qemu aims at a being an experimental development platform devoted to embedded systems based on ARM processor, supporting hard realtime extension. It allows developers to have a deep understanding of virtualization mechanisms provided by XEN as well as the available security/protection mechanisms on ARM processors (ARM9/ARM11).

 

The approach of this release is strongly based on some previous (and ongoing) work towards ARM port of XEN, such as Samsung's one and MontaVista's one. However, there is a major difference between the other approaches: the binary image already contains the hypervisor and all necessary OS and components for domain 0 and domain U. The isolation is however guaranteed through the use of different page tables tackling page frames with different privileges. A big advantage of this approach is to have all -off-the-shelf- structures and functions available from the Linux kernel. It also benefits from an unified Makefile (Linux-based) environment for all source code. In the xen/ subtree, there is the hypervisor code which relies on ARM-dependent Linux code: sometimes, it is simply a symbolic link to the original file, sometimes the file has been adapted accordingly and in this case, there is a copy in the subtree (see xen/arch/arm/*)

 

Right now, xen-pxa270-qemu is running on QEMU (arm-system-qemu) using the mainstone platform (based on PXA270). But, since xen-pxa270-colibri contains the full Linux tree, some other ARM platform can also be used provided that some adaptations of the machine-specific code.

 

We are working a lot on this development, meaning that the current release does not do so much. The hypervisor is booting and miniOS is initiated in its bootstrapping process. The release is an experimental development, and still much work remains to be done. The idea is to give everyone who would be interested in helping us in this development.

 

I hope that this release will stimulate some interest and discussions around our approach.

 

Kind regards

Daniel

 

 

 

 

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