Xen Project Developer & Design Summit

The XenStore is a central piece of the Xen framework on which most operations depend. This makes it both a central point of failure and a performance bottleneck. In this presentation, Filipe will present NEC's work on removing the XenStore and replacing it with NoXS, a hypervisor-based mechanism that provides the necessary functionality to replace the XenStore when running paravirtualized guests. NoXS not only bring advantages in terms of guest management operations' times, but also in terms of scalability and reliability by simplifying dom0. NoXS is also backwards compatible by allowing the XenStore to run in parallel. This presentation will discuss the design of NoXS and show initial results of the prototype implementation, namely boot times bellow 20 ms for up to 8000 guests. The presenter would also like to discuss whether this work is interesting to the Xen project, and if so, how it could be upstreamed.