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Re: [Xen-devel] [ANNOUNCE] xen ocaml tools

To: xen-devel <xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] [ANNOUNCE] xen ocaml tools
From: Patrick Colp <pjcolp@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:34:34 -0800
Cc: Vincent Hanquez <vincent.hanquez@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Thomas Gazagnaire <Thomas.Gazagnaire@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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I've cleaned up the attack code (and added copy right info), Makefile, and README a bit for the attack. Please find the revised version attached.


Patrick


Patrick Colp wrote:
Vincent Hanquez wrote:
Patrick Colp wrote:
I'm really excited to see somebody else working on an OCaml XenStore! I was wondering if you could tell me what the difference are between this implementation and the one I recently released to the community?
this is a bit hard to tell without testing your version.

but i think the main difference is the way we handle transactions, which should provide a stable average time to commit transactions when having lots of xenstore traffic from guests.

I think you're thinking of my initial release last year. The version I released a few months ago also has an in-memory store and greatly improved transactions. It was motivated by the need to survive things like DoS attacks.

I wrote a little attack program (in OCaml) which runs from any DomU and brought the original xenstored to its knees. With the attack going, it's impossible to bring a new domain up -- it just hangs forever attempting to bring it up. Basically, the attack just hammers xenstored with micro-transactions. With the original transaction system, which allows the first committing transaction in a generation to win, long transactions could never complete. I implemented transactions that would enable all concurrent but non-conflicting transactions to commit. This made my version of xenstored resilient to the attack.

I played around with this with your version too, but found that, while it would not hang forever while attempting to load a domain, it would instead die after a few seconds with the following error:

Error: (2, 'No such file or directory')

I tried with with the eagain mode thing (random dropping of 1/3 of all transactions) both enabled and disabled, but it had the same effect (except that with the mode enabled, 1/3 of all transactions would fail regardless of if they should or not).

I've been reading over your code and noticed that you seem to have a mini-implementation of libxc. I was wondering why you chose to do this over using the pre-existing libxenctrl? Does this make the final executable smaller?


Patrick


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