Main Page

From VirtualSquare

Virtual Square: all the virtuality you always wanted but you were afraid to ask

Welcome to Virtual Square wiki!
Here you'll find almost everything you need to know to get started using Virtual Square suite of tools and software. Remember that the software presented in this Wiki is produced by a research project and so part of it is extremely experimental.

Contents 1 News 2 User's documentation 3 Overview of tools and libraries 4 Virtual Square Bibliography 5 Documentation in progress

[edit] News

Jan 15, 2010

kmview zerovirt: the experimental code include the new zerovirt optimization. The kernel module is able to reduce the number of system call notifications sent to the monitor depending on the actual virtualizations required. The "make vde-2" test provides these results: kernel 22.7s, kmview (no modules or just ghost mounted partitions) 23.9s (+5.5%), full kmview 38.5s (+70%), optimized umview 51.0 (+124%), umview on vanilla kernel 75.7s (+233%). Ghost mounts provide less transparency (only absolute pathnames and cd are supported) while add almost no virtualization costs. It is up to the user to decide (by the mount option 'ghost') whether transparency or performance is required.

Oct 26, 2009

0.8 was merged, the new experimental version include the management of safe (a.k.a. human) mode (command option -s): unprivileged virtual users have unprivileged access to virtual resource. For example an umprivileged user cannot add/remove modules, mount filesystems, access to files when te permission mode does not allow it.

Sep 1, 2009

The experimental version is quite stable and will be merged very soon. It has been renamed to 0.8 (instead of 0.9) because there is already space for new features. There is another merge under way: fuseext2 project (in virtualsquare) and fuse-ext2 project (by Alper Akcan). The experimental version of fuse-ext2 (by Alper Akcan and Renzo Davoli) is now fully umview compatible, includes all the features from both projects and several new fixes. Virtualsquare will soon move to the new fuse-ext2 code.

Aug 17, 2009

A lot of new code in the experimental branch. ViewFS now manages permissions and ownership. BinFmt can select different interpreters for executable depending on the path. Management of UID and extendend attributes (xattr) in xmview core.

Aug 07, 2009

ViewOS 0.8 beta (in svn rd235 branch). The core/module interface is completely new. There is a global hash table that tracks all the mounted partitions/sockets/system calls. The whole structure is highly scalable.

Jul 23, 2009

ViewOS: The new svn version is able to run with mount/umount standard commands. [ku]mview now virtualize uid/gid and setuid/setgid. /bin/[u]mount run as uid=0 and euid=0. The new version has succesfully passed all our standard tests. viewmount/viewumount have been deprecated and will be removed from svn soon.

Jul 22, 2009

Due to a change in the code of mount/umount the standard commands are not compatible with View-OS (umview-kmview) since util-linux-ng v.2.15-rc1. In case mount/umount answers "mount: only root can do that", use the new commands viewmount/viewumount instead (check out the latest svn version to have them). The syntax of viewmount/viewumount is the same as mount/umount.

Jul 02, 2009

IPN character devices: data can flow into Inter Process Networks through sockets, network interfaces and now devices.

Older news