Xen Developer & Design Summit 2018 has ended

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Xen Developer & Design Summit 2018

09:00 GMT+07

Xen Project Weather Report 2018 - Lars Kurth, Xen Project / Citrix

In this talk, we will give an overview of the state of the Xen Project, trends that impact the project, see whether challenges that surfaced last year have been addressed and how we did it, and highlight new challenges and solutions for the coming year.

Wednesday June 20, 2018 09:00 - 09:30 GMT+07
Jiangning, Level 2

Company Both
Audience Beginner
Subject Hypervisor

09:35 GMT+07

Xen Project: Where Are We Going with x86? - George Dunlap, Citrix Systems R&D UK Ltd

The Xen Hypervisor is 15 years old, but like Linux, it is still
undergoing significant upgrades and improvements. This talk will
cover recent and upcoming developments in Xen on the x86 architecture,
including the newly-released 'PVH' guest virtualization mode, the
future of PV mode, qemu deprivileging, and more. We will cover why
these new features are important for a wide range of environments,
from cloud to embedded.

Speakers

George Dunlap

Principal Software Engineer, Citrix Systems R&D UK Ltd

George Dunlap worked with the Xen project while a graduate student at the University of Michigan before receiving his PhD in 2006, then worked as a core Xen developer for many years for Citrix's open-source team in Cambridge, England. He is now community manager and chairman of the... Read More →

Wednesday June 20, 2018 09:35 - 10:05 GMT+07
Jiangning, Level 2

Company Both
Audience Intermediate
Subject Hypervisor

11:45 GMT+07

EPT-Based Sub-page Write Protection On Xenc - Yi Zhang, Intel

EPT-Based Sub-page Write Protection referred to as SPP, it is a capability which allow Virtual Machine Monitors(VMM) to specify write-permission for guest physical memory at a sub-page(128 byte) granularity. When this capability is utilized, the CPU enforces write-access permissions for sub-page regions of 4K pages as specified by the VMM. EPT-based sub-page permissions is intended to enable fine-grained memory write enforcement by a VMM for security(guest OS monitoring) and usages such as device virtualization and memory check-point.

Speakers

Yi Zhang

Sr. Software Engineer, Intel

Working in intel OTC Hypervisor Team.

spp xen summit2018 V2 PPTX

Wednesday June 20, 2018 11:45 - 12:15 GMT+07
Jiangning, Level 2

Company Both
Audience Beginner
Subject Hypervisor

11:45 GMT+07

Qubes in Action - Feng Li, N/A

Qubes is a Xen-based community distribution that designed to provide strong security for desktop computing.
And as a security-oriented distribution, Qubes meets the trend of hardware/software co-designed security system.
This speech will come with the following sub-topics:
1) Overall Design
anatomy of system architecture of Qubes and the key ideas behind it, especially for the latest version 4.0.
2) Virtualization based Security Archtecture
designing philosophy of Qubes from a security perspective, including its unique and novel security features.
3) Potential Acceleration Technologies for Toolstack
especially, our practice of accelerating the Python-based SaltStack.

Reference links:
Qubes: https://www.qubes-os.org/
SaltStack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_%28software%29

Speakers

Feng Li

Freelancer, N/A

After focused on mobile software development for 11+ years(has been working in Motorola, Samsung, and Alibaba) in China, I am now engaged in the field of Cloud infrastructure (had been worked in Dell EMC and Citrix Systems). My previous speaking experience: 1) "eBPF in Action", LinuxCon... Read More →

Wednesday June 20, 2018 11:45 - 12:15 GMT+07
Meeting Room 4, Level 3

Company Both
Audience Advanced
Subject Community

12:20 GMT+07

Intel Processor Trace for Xen Hypervisor - Luwei Kang, Intel

Intel Processor Trace is a hardware feature that recording information about software execution with minimal impact to system execution. Existing hardware is unfriendly to enable Intel PT in guest because the implementation of shadow ToPA is very complex. Intel PT VMX improvements will treat PT output addresses as Guest Physical Addresses (GPAs) and translate them using EPT that serves to simplify the process of Intel PT virtualization for using by a guest software. We have submitted a patch set to enable Intel PT in XEN HVM guest for collecting hardware behavior, backwards debugging for GDB and so on. We also plan to implement system mode for tracing XEN hypervisor and guest's behavior if necessary.

Speakers

Luwei Kang

Software Engineer, Intel

I worked in Intel virtualization enabling team and focus on X86 CPU new feature enabling in virtualization.

Intel Processor Trace for Xen Hypervisor pdf

Wednesday June 20, 2018 12:20 - 13:20 GMT+07
Jiangning, Level 2

Company Both
Audience Any
Subject Hypervisor

09:35 GMT+07

Windows PV Drivers Project: Status and Updates - Paul Durrant, Citrix Systems

This talk will give a brief background to the Xen Project Windows PV driver architecture for those who are not already familiar. It will then go on to update the community on recent changes to the drivers, and planned future changed. It will also cover the new HID and console drivers that have been introduced to the supported set, including demonstrations of those drivers.

Speakers

Paul Durrant

Principal Hypervisor Engineer, Amazon

Paul Durrant is a Principal Hypervisor Engineer in the Amazon Web Services EC2 team based in Cambridge, UK.

Thursday June 21, 2018 09:35 - 10:05 GMT+07
Jiangning, Level 2

Company Both
Audience Intermediate
Subject Community

13:50 GMT+07

Design and Implementation of Automotive Virtualization Based on Xen - Sung-Min Lee, Samsung Electronics

This talk presents a production-ready automotive virtualization solution with Xen. The key requirements that we focus are super-fast startup and recovery from failure, static virtual machine creation with dedicated resources, and performance effective graphics rendering. To reduce the boot time, we optimize the Xen startup procedure by effectively initializing Xen heap and VM memory, and booting multiple VMs concurrently. We provide fast recovery mechanism by re-implementing the VM reset feature. We also develop a highly optimized graphics APIs-forwarding mechanism supporting OpenGLES APIs up to v3.2. The pass rate of Khronos CTS in a guest OS is comparable to the Domain0’s. Our experiment shows that our virtualization solution provides reasonable performance for ARM-based automotive systems (hypervisor booting: less than 70ms, graphics performance: about 96% of Domain0).

Speakers

Sung-Min Lee

Principal Engineer, Samsung Electronics

Dr. Sung-Min Lee is a Principal Engineer leading virtualization project at Samsung Research. He has been working on a wide range of virtualization projects including type1/type2 hypervisor, virtualization for mobile and CE devices, automotive virtualization, security, and cloud computing... Read More →

Xen Summit2018 Samsung Automotive Virtualization pdf

Thursday June 21, 2018 13:50 - 14:20 GMT+07
Meeting Room 5, Level 3

Company Both
Audience Intermediate
Subject Embedded / Automotive

13:50 GMT+07

Security Disclosure Policies: A Look Behind the Scenes - Lars Kurth, Xen Project / Citrix

The tech world does not live in silos: security vulnerabilities can impact an entire ecosystem (case in point Meltdown and Spectre).

This session will introduce different patterns for managing the disclosure of security vulnerabilities in use today: we will look at what different types of vendors (distros, product vendors, cloud providers or a combination of them) and the Xen Project security team do from the discovery of a vulnerability to it being deployed. We will also look at the interaction between the Xen Project and these downstreams in the context of our security policy.

This talk will give you a glimpse into a quite extensive machinery which kicks into gear across different organisations when security vulnerabilities are discovered and fixed behind the scenes.

Speakers

Lars Kurth

Director Open Source / Project Chairperson The Xen Project , Citrix Systems UK Ltd.

Lars Kurth is a highly effective, passionate community manager with strong experience of working with open source communities (Symbian, Symbian DevCo, Eclipse, GNU) and currently is the community manager for the Xen Project. Lars has 12 years of experience building and leading engineering... Read More →

Thursday June 21, 2018 13:50 - 14:20 GMT+07
Meeting Room 4, Level 3

Company Both
Audience Beginner
Subject Community

14:25 GMT+07

Performance tuning on Xen platform - Bo Zhang & Yifei Jiang, Huawei

Huawei Cloud applies xen platform to many customer scenarios. This talk will introduce our optimizations on the xen platform to solve problems occuring in these scenarios.
E.g
1. Redesign the implementation of kernel locks to improve the scalability of the Xen platform in large-scale server scenarios.
2. Develop LazyFPU and L3 cache affinity features to improve virtual machine performance in SAP HANA database service scenarios.
3. Develop HostNUMA and GuestNUMA features to enhance virtual machine performance in specvirt test and desktop cloud scenarios.
4. Shorten the time cost of concurrent life-cycle operations for large scales of virtual machines, to achieve quick change of classes in the cloud classroom.

Speakers

Yifei Jiang

Chief Engineer, Huawei

Yifei Jiang is a chief engineer at Huawei, and has 9 years working experience on Virtualization. Currently working on next generation virtualization technology research.

Bo Zhang

Senior Software Engineer, Huawei

Bo Zhang is senior software engineer at Huawei, has 8 years working experience on Virtualization.

Thursday June 21, 2018 14:25 - 14:55 GMT+07
Meeting Room 4, Level 3

Company Both
Audience Any
Subject Performance

15:00 GMT+07

Xen Testing at Intel - Xudong Hao, Intel

Xen is one of most popular virtualization project, many companies and individuals participate in the development, testing and using of Xen. In this presentation, Xudong will give an introduction of Intel QA team's test coverage for Xen, demonstrate the pre check in for new features testing, and post check in for regression testing, as well as test methodology and test framework.

Speakers

Xudong Hao

Software Engineer, Intel

Xudong Hao is working on Intel virtualization team, he has several years development and validation experience on Xen, and focus on Intel new features on Xen validation and quality assurance currently.

Xen testing at Intel pdf

Thursday June 21, 2018 15:00 - 15:30 GMT+07
Meeting Room 4, Level 3

Company Both
Audience Intermediate
Subject Case Study / User Story

09:00 GMT+07

Speculation and Response: Spectre, Meltdown, XPTI, and Panopticon - George Dunlap, Citrix Systems R&D UK Ltd

Spectre and Meltdown were issues disclosed at the beginning
of this year. Unlike previous bugs, they represent not simple
mistakes, but the failure of a fundamental assumption that processor
designers have been making for years.

This talk will briefly give an overview of speculation, and how the
Spectre and Meltdown attacks work at a high level. It will then give
an analysis of how difficult these vulnerabilities are to exploit in
Xen, and how the various mitigations work. Finally, I'll describe
what I've been calling Panopticon, an approach that should be able to
mitigate the worst effects of any future speculation bug.

Speakers

George Dunlap

Principal Software Engineer, Citrix Systems R&D UK Ltd

George Dunlap worked with the Xen project while a graduate student at the University of Michigan before receiving his PhD in 2006, then worked as a core Xen developer for many years for Citrix's open-source team in Cambridge, England. He is now community manager and chairman of the... Read More →

Friday June 22, 2018 09:00 - 09:30 GMT+07
Jiangning, Level 2

Company Both
Audience Intermediate
Subject Hypervisor

09:35 GMT+07

Unleashing the Power of Unikernels with Unikraft - Florian Schmidt, NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH

By leveraging specialization and the use of minimalistic OSes, unikernels are able to yield impressive numbers, including fast instantiation times (tens of milliseconds or less), tiny memory footprints (a few MBs or even KBs), and high consolidation (e.g., being able to run many instances on a single device), not to mention a reduced attack surface and easier certification.

The fundamental drawback of unikernels is that they require that applications be manually ported to the underlying minimalistic OS; this requires both expert work and often considerable amount of time.

To address this, we present Unikraft, a Xen sub-project aimed at automating the process of building customized unikernels tailored
to specific applications and thus significantly reducing development
time. We will provide a detailed explanation of the system as well as a demonstration of it.

Speakers

Florian Schmidt

Research Scientist, NEC Laboratories Europe

Florian is a researcher at NEC Laboratories Europe. His interests lie in network and OS/virtualization topics, and their intersection. Currently, he is one of the maintainers of and contributors to the Unikraft unikernel project. Before joining NEC Laboratories, he worked at and received... Read More →

Friday June 22, 2018 09:35 - 10:05 GMT+07
Jiangning, Level 2

Company Both
Audience Any
Subject Unikernels

10:10 GMT+07

Xenwatch Multithreading - Dongli Zhang, Oracle

The Xen domU create/destroy and device hotplug rely on xenwatch kernel thread to run xenwatch event callback function for each subscribed xenstore node update. Any event callback function hang would stall the only single xenwatch thread and forbid further domU create/destroy or device hotplug. This talk presents how Xenwatch Multithreading can address the xenwatch stall issue. In addition to the default xenwatch thread, the dom0 will create a per-domU kernel thread for each domU to handle their own xenwatch event. Therefore, domU create/destroy or device hotplug are still allowed even when a specific per-domU xenwatch thread is stalled. This talk first discusses the limitation in single-threaded xenwatch design with some case studies, then explains the basic knowledge on paravirtual driver, and finally presents the challenge, design and implementation of xenwatch multithreading.

Speakers

Dongli Zhang

Principal Member of Technical Staff, Oracle

Dongli Zhang is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Oracle Linux, where his work is to sustain Xen and Linux used by Oracle products, e.g., Oracle VM, Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK), Private Cloud Appliance (PCA) or Oracle Public Cloud (OPC). He primarily works on paravirtual... Read More →

xenwatch multithreading pdf

xenwatch multithreading odp

Friday June 22, 2018 10:10 - 10:40 GMT+07
Jiangning, Level 2

Company Both
Audience Beginner
Subject Case Study / User Story

11:45 GMT+07

Unikraft: An easy way of crafting Unikernels on Arm - Kaly Xin, ARM

Unikernels have good performance and a very tiny footprint. But the process of converting an application to a Unikernel requires expert porting work and a considerable amount of time.
Wei will introduce a new Unikernel development model – Unikraft. Unikraft aims to free Unikernels from the fundamental drawback of manual porting costs. Since Unikraft was announced, Wei has been actively working with the community to get involved in this project. In this presentation Wei intends to share some knowledge of Unikraft, including:

1) The concept and architecture of Unikraft,

2) The tool stack and config menu,

3) Features available on Arm,

4) Upcoming features on Arm.

Wei also will run a demo on an Arm server showing:

1) Conversion of an application to Unikernel,

2) Configuration of this Unikernel through a menu system,

3) The converted Unikernel running!

Speakers

KALY XIN

Senior Software Engineering Manager, ARM China

Friday June 22, 2018 11:45 - 12:15 GMT+07
Meeting Room 5, Level 3

Company Both
Audience Beginner
Subject Unikernels

12:20 GMT+07

The Evolution of Virtualization in the Arm Architecture - Julien Grall, ARM

Virtualization capabilities were added to the latest revision of the Armv7-A architectures (with processors like Cortex A7 and A15), and this was extended further with Armv8-A (64bit). Since then, Arm has been improving virtualization support with incremental versions of the Armv8 architecture.

This talk will give an overview of the features added.

Speakers

Julien Grall

Xen maintainer, Amazon Web Services

Julien Grall is an kernel/hypervisor engineer in the Amazon EC2 team. He is currently working on adding support for live updating the Xen hypervisor. Julien has been involved in Xen community since 2012. Today he is a Xen Project committer, and he maintains Xen on Arm.

Friday June 22, 2018 12:20 - 12:50 GMT+07
Meeting Room 4, Level 3

Company Both
Audience Beginner
Subject Community