Mailing List Archive

Gábor Radics wrote:

>Dear all,
>
>if I understand well on the IBM's power5 processor an sHype Hypervisor
>running which makes the same job what Xen makes on an x86 processor.
>I also read the Xen article in LINUX FORMAT (June 2005), that xen's
>powerPC-s port is under way.
>
>
IBM has a hypervisor for power and x86 called rHype
(http://www.research.ibm.com/hypervisor) that is Open Source. There is
also a closely related research project at IBM called sHype to design a
secure hypervisor architecture (that was initially based on rHype).
Think SELinux for hypervisors.

There is also an effort to develop a Xen port for the power architecture
(http://xeno-ppc.bkbits.net).

There is another effort to build a secure hypervisor architecture for
Xen called XenSE. Even though this seems like a lot of different
projects (and a heck of a lot to keep straight) they are all very
closely related and there's a lot of collaboration.

>Thanks
>Gabor
>
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Xen-users mailing list
>Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
>http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
>


_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

IBM people are working on the Xen PPC port ;-) This is based on rHype,
IBM's open source research hypervisor (not the one they sell). I believe
the intention is for it to be compatible with the existing IBM / PPC
hypervisor interface.

sHype is IBM's experimental hypervisor with mandatory access control
extensions (like SELinux but at the virtual machine, rather than the OS
level). Another team from IBM are working on porting these extensions to
Xen. This security work ("XenSE") isn't for fixing bugs in Xen but rather
to enable a new level of security.

A particularly nice application for Xen would be enabling load balancing
across clusters of IBM's PPC970 based blades. Another nice side effect of
this work is that you'll be able to use the same Xen-based virtual machine
management tools across all platforms (x86, x86_64, PPC, IA-64) because
they'll all run Xen.

Cheers,
Mark

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users

Gábor Radics wrote:
>
> if I understand well on the IBM's power5 processor an sHype Hypervisor
> running which makes the same job what Xen makes on an x86 processor.
> I also read the Xen article in LINUX FORMAT (June 2005), that xen's
> powerPC-s port is under way.
>
> My question is in this context that will be xen the successor of the
> sHype in the future, or will it only be an alternative hypervisor or
> what is the plan with xen for powerPC?
>
> IBM has a very nice setup, namely eSeries OpenPower 720, and I would be
> interested, if I would be able to try/test xen on them as well. Just for
> curiosity.

I'm one of the people working on the Xen PowerPC port. We're not
targeting POWER5 systems, but rather 970 systems (we're specifically
using Momentum's Maple board for development).

On the plus side, POWER5 systems have an already-working hypervisor
installed (which as others have pointed out is not sHype). :)

--
Hollis Blanchard
IBM Linux Technology Center

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users