RE: L4VM: Which VM can be tested?

Hello Jowkju,

> I want to test L4VM, so I compiled pistachio kernel and marzipan. However,
the web page 
> "Running the Resource Monitor" only says that if the list of modules is
defined by GRUB
> , marzipan scans it and makes virtual machines(VMs).

> I want to test VMs with marzipan, then what modules can I use? l4linux?

You need to download the afterburner module, configure, and build it. The
afterburner make environment contains logic to download subsequent modules
(pistachio etc.) itself.

> 1. Could you give me some test examples or documents on L4 Virtualization
Environment?

Within the afterburner source tree, there's a small user manual on how to
build and boot virtual machines; find it under
afterburner/afterburn-wedge/doc/userman.tex. 

> 2. Your team doesn't longer research on L4 VM with Marzipan?? 
> Instead of it, pre-virtualization is more serious project?? Right??

No that's wrong. Pre-virtualization (or, afterburning) just denotes a
technique to make a guest OS para-virtualization friendly, similar to
VMware's VMI. A pre-virtualized Linux guest OS may run on different
platforms: directly on raw hardware; on top of Xen; or, finally, on top of
L4. To run on top of L4, you'll need additional user-level binaries such as
the marzipan resource monitor.

Karlsruhe's team is still actively researching L4-based VMs based on
pre-virtualization. And we're still using marzipan and other user apps to
run those VMs. You've probably mixed it with L4Linux, which is basically the
predecessor of the pre-virtualization project, at least in terms of L4-based
virtualization. L4Linux is not being used anymore in Karlsruhe. 


Regards,
-Jan



--
Jan Stoess
Lehrstuhl Systemarchitektur
Universitaet Karlsruhe
Phone: +49 (721) 608-4056 
Fax: +49 (721) 608-7664 
eMail: [email protected]