Open Solaris on Xen

Open Solaris on Xen - finally something real to touch. If you are a developer you can join and help making this project real.

Xen on Open Solaris Openning Day Page:

Today, we're making the first source code snapshot of our OpenSolaris on Xen project available to the OpenSolaris developer community.

There are many bugs still in waiting, many puzzles to be solved, many things left to do. A true work in progress. Why are we doing this now? Because we don't believe the developer community only wants finished projects to test. We believe that some developers want to participate during the core development process, not after, and now this project opens its doors to that kind of participation.

We have a snapshot of our development tree for OpenSolaris on Xen, synced up with Nevada build 31. That code snapshot should be able to boot and run on all the hardware that build 31 can today, plus it can boot as a diskless unprivileged domain on Xen 3.0.

Running on Xen, OpenSolaris is reasonably stable, but it's still very much "pre-alpha" compared with our usual finished code quality. Installing and configuring a client is do-able, but not for the faint of heart. The current instructions can be found here.

Goals of the Project

This project aims to fully support OpenSolaris on Xen. Here's our top-level technology goals:

• x86 and x64 paravirtualized guest kernels supporting dom0, domU, and driver domains

• All reasonable combinations of Solaris, Linux, *BSD, and other paravirtualized OSes should interoperate.

• Live migration, whole OS checkpoint/resume

• MP limits and scale to match Xen's capabilities

• Maximal portability to enable Solaris-on-Xen ports to other architectures.

• Observability and debugging to enable performance work, RAS, system management, and sustaining.

• Support fully virtualized guests [though this is mostly a Xen capability, rather than an OpenSolaris capability per se.]

• Explore trusted platform capabilities.