Xen work for R-series

Xen is a mature, enterprise-grade, open-source type I hypervisor. This session we will give a brief project update about our recent 4.2 release and the roadmap for our upcoming 4.3 release. We will then discuss various topics about Xen integration in Ubuntu.

UPDATE: Slides shown at the presentation can be found here:

http://www.slideshare.net/dunlapg/uds-2012-xen

A detailed feature list for 4.2 can be found here:

http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_4.2_Feature_List

There are two related features that are probably the most important from a user / integration perspective:

* libxl has gone from being a "tech preview" to having an officially-supported stable interface. libxl is a library designed to allow all the basic hypervisor functionality in a consistent, stable interface which will be backwards-compatible. There are already libvirt bindings available for libxl (not sure which release this will be in).

* xl is now the default toolstack, rather than xend. xl is built on top of libxl, and is meant to be a drop-in replacement for xm. It is entirely written in C (xend and xm are written in python). The main difference users see (other than performance improvements) should only be that they type "xl" instead of "xm" for their basic commands.

Rationale:

Goal:

1. To update other Ubuntu developers on the progress of the Xen project

2. To define what it would look like to have Xen be easy-to-use, robust, and reliable in Raring

3. To identify any changes which need to happen for #2 to take place.