################################# __ __ _ _ _ \ \/ /___ _ __ | || | / | \ // _ \ '_ \ | || |_ | | / \ __/ | | | |__ _|| | /_/\_\___|_| |_| |_|(_)_| ################################# http://www.xen.org/ What is Xen? ============ Xen is a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) originally developed by the Systems Research Group of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, as part of the UK-EPSRC funded XenoServers project. Xen is freely-distributable Open Source software, released under the GNU GPL. Since its initial public release, Xen has grown a large development community, spearheaded by xen.org (http://www.xen.org). The 4.1 release offers excellent performance, hardware support and enterprise-grade features such as x86_32-PAE, x86_64, SMP guests and live relocation of VMs. Ports to Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD and Solaris are available from the community. This file contains some quick-start instructions to install Xen on your system. For full documentation, see the Xen User Manual. If this is a pre-built release then you can find the manual at: dist/install/usr/share/doc/xen/pdf/user.pdf If you have a source release, then 'make -C docs' will build the manual at docs/pdf/user.pdf. Quick-Start Guide ================= First, there are a number of prerequisites for building a Xen source release. Make sure you have all the following installed, either by visiting the project webpage or installing a pre-built package provided by your Linux distributor: * GCC v3.4 or later * GNU Make * GNU Binutils * Development install of zlib (e.g., zlib-dev) * Development install of Python v2.3 or later (e.g., python-dev) * Development install of curses (e.g., libncurses-dev) * Development install of openssl (e.g., openssl-dev) * Development install of x11 (e.g. xorg-x11-dev) * bridge-utils package (/sbin/brctl) * iproute package (/sbin/ip) * hotplug or udev * GNU bison and GNU flex [NB. Unless noted otherwise, all the following steps should be performed with root privileges.] 1. Download and untar the source tarball file. This will be a file named xen-unstable-src.tgz, or xen-$version-src.tgz. You can also pull the current version from the mercurial repository at http://xenbits.xensource.com/ # tar xzf xen-unstable-src.tgz Assuming you are using the unstable tree, this will untar into xen-unstable. The rest of the instructions use the unstable tree as an example, substitute the version for unstable. 2. cd to xen-unstable (or whatever you sensibly rename it to). On Linux: 3. For the very first build, or if you want to destroy existing .configs and build trees, perform the following steps: # make world # make install This will create and install onto the local machine. It will build the xen binary (xen.gz), and a linux kernel and modules that can be used in both dom0 and an unprivileged guest kernel (vmlinuz-2.6.x-xen), the tools and the documentation. You can override the destination for make install by setting DESTDIR to some value. The make command line defaults to building the kernel vmlinuz-2.6.x-xen. You can override this default by specifying KERNELS=kernelname. For example, you can make two kernels - linux-2.6-xen0 and linux-2.6-xenU - which are smaller builds containing only selected modules, intended primarily for developers that don't like to wait for a full -xen kernel to build. The -xenU kernel is particularly small, as it does not contain any physical device drivers, and hence is only useful for guest domains. To make these two kernels, simply specify KERNELS="linux-2.6-xen0 linux-2.6-xenU" in the make command line. 4. To rebuild an existing tree without modifying the config: # make dist This will build and install xen, kernels, tools, and docs into the local dist/ directory. You can override the destination for make install by setting DISTDIR to some value. make install and make dist differ in that make install does the right things for your local machine (installing the appropriate version of hotplug or udev scripts, for example), but make dist includes all versions of those scripts, so that you can copy the dist directory to another machine and install from that distribution. 5. To rebuild a kernel with a modified config: # make linux-2.6-xen-config CONFIGMODE=menuconfig (or xconfig) # make linux-2.6-xen-build # make linux-2.6-xen-install Depending on your config, you may need to use 'mkinitrd' to create an initial ram disk, just like a native system e.g. # depmod 2.6.18-xen # mkinitrd -v -f --with=aacraid --with=sd_mod --with=scsi_mod initrd-2.6.18-xen.img 2.6.18-xen Other systems may requires the use of 'mkinitramfs' to create the ram disk. # depmod 2.6.18-xen # mkinitramfs -o initrd-2.6.18-xen.img 2.6.18-xen Python Runtime Libraries ======================== Xend (the Xen daemon) has the following runtime dependencies: * Python 2.3 or later. In many distros, the XML-aspects to the standard library (xml.dom.minidom etc) are broken out into a separate python-xml package. This is also required. URL: http://www.python.org/ Debian: python, python-xml * For optional SSL support, pyOpenSSL: URL: http://pyopenssl.sourceforge.net/ Debian: python-pyopenssl * For optional PAM support, PyPAM: URL: http://www.pangalactic.org/PyPAM/ Debian: python-pam * For optional XenAPI support in XM, PyXML: URL: http://pyxml.sourceforge.net YUM: PyXML Intel(R) Trusted Execution Technology Support ============================================= Intel's technology for safer computing, Intel(R) Trusted Execution Technology (Intel(R) TXT), defines platform-level enhancements that provide the building blocks for creating trusted platforms. For more information, see http://www.intel.com/technology/security/. Intel(R) TXT support is provided by the Trusted Boot (tboot) module in conjunction with minimal logic in the Xen hypervisor. Tboot is an open source, pre- kernel/VMM module that uses Intel(R) TXT to perform a measured and verified launch of an OS kernel/VMM. The Trusted Boot module is available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/tboot. This project hosts the code in a mercurial repo at http://tboot.sourceforge.net/hg/tboot.hg and contains tarballs of the source. Instructions in the tboot README describe how to modify grub.conf to use tboot to launch Xen. There are optional targets as part of Xen's top-level makefile that will download and build tboot: install-tboot, build-tboot, dist-tboot, clean-tboot. These will download the latest tar file from the SourceForge site using wget, then build/install/dist according to Xen's settings.