openstack team mailing list archive

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 01:43:23PM +0300, Cristian Tomoiaga wrote:
> As for the compute part, I may need to work with libvirt but I want to
> avoid that if possible. Libxl was meant for stacks right ? Again, this may
> not be acceptable and I would like to know.

Nova already has two drivers which support Xen, one using XenAPI and
the other using libvirt. Libvirt itself will either use the legacy
XenD/XenStore APIs, or on new enough Xen will use libxl.

libxl is a pretty low level interface, not really targetted for direct
application usage, but rather for building management APIs like libvirt
or XCP. IMHO it would not really be appropriate for OpenStack to directly
use libxl. Given that Nova already has two virt drivers which can work
with Xen, I also don't really think there's a need to add a 3rd using
libxl.

> Regarding KVM, I did not use it until now. I don't like the fact the
> security issues pop up more often then I would like (I may be wrong ?).
> There are other reasons but are not important in my decision.

Having worked with both Xen & KVM for 8 years now, I don't see that
either of them are really winning in terms of security issues in the
hypervisor or userspace. Both of them have had their fair share of
vulnerabilities. In terms of the device model, they both share use
of the QEMU codebase, so many vulnerabilities detected with KVM will
also apply to Xen and vica-verca. So I don't think your assertion
that KVM suffers more issues is really accurate.

> Should I go with Libxl or stick to libvirt ? Should I start to work on
> local storage or has someone already started and I should contact him ?

As far as Nova virt drivers for Xen are concerned, you should either
use the XenAPI driver, or the libvirt driver.

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-       http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|