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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 the latest developments are extremely experimental.

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

[edit] News

Aug 14, 2010: umview kernel patches updated to 2.6.35 (both for ptrace and for ptrace-utrace). IPN and kmview tested against 2.6.35.

Aug 10, 2010: lwipv6 now supports slirpv6. The new code for the stack and the command slirpvde6 are in the experimental branch on sourceforge. slirpvde6 is very similar to slirpvde but: (1) it is based on lwipv6 instead of the old bsd stack, (2) it supports both IPv4 and IPv6.

Jun 15, 2010: umview kernel patches, ipn, kmview kernel module updated to 2.6.34. New: ptrace_vm/ptrace_multi are now supported also on ptrace-utrace (ptrace implementation based on utrace). It is now possible to compile a kernel supporting both umview with optimizations and kmview.

Apr 26, 2010: libvdeplug: vdestream interface to "streamify" vde packets. New slirpvde based on the latest slirp code (from Qemu). slirpvde and vde_plug2tap can connect to a (remote) vde_plug instead of a local switch: '-s -' (i.e. switch name == '-') means that packets get sent/received as a stream on stdin/stdout.

Apr 19, 2010: umfusecram updated. new umfusentfs-3g (ntfs file system access, based on the ntfs-3g library) and umfusearchive (mount tar/cpio archives, including compressed archive, rw access).

Apr 11, 2010: umdevvd: virtual disk support. This module uses the VBoxDD library to access disk images for virtual machines. It supports VDI, VHD and VMDH disks.

Apr 04, 2010: VDE native support for VirtualBox: this new feature is included in a patch for VirtualBox. This (alpha version) patch can be retrieved from our vde-2's svn repository.

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.

Older news

[edit] User's documentation

Core Documentation

Tutorials

Tutorial 1

VDE Basic Networking

Tutorial 2

Umview with umfuse

Umview networking: Umnet

Tutorial 4

Running foreign code

Tutorial 5

Virtually partitioned Virtual Disks

Tutorial 6

Time/uname and other virtualities

Advanced Tutorials

Advanced Tutorial 1

Remote command execution on umview with overlapped filesystem

Advanced Tutorial 2

Port forwarding inside umview environment

Advanced Tutorial 3

Creating VLANs with multiple vde switches

Advanced Tutorial 4

Managing Fast Spanning Tree Protocol on vde networks

Useful links

Virtual distributed Ethernet

VDE project on sourceforge

View-OS project

View-OS project homepage at Sourceforge

Virtual Square

Virtual Square site: ideas of Evolution

OS Zoo

OS Zoo (a sibling project from the same team), a set of preinstalled imaged for Qemu. Download 'n run. It is also possible to test them live direcly in your browser.

VDE account for CS.UniBO.IT users

[edit] Overview of tools and libraries

SVG source available here.

[edit] Virtual Square Bibliography

Renzo Davoli, Michael Goldweber View-OS: Change your View on Virtualization. Proc. of Linux Kongress, 2009 (slides)

Ludovico Gardenghi, Michael Goldweber and Renzo Davoli View-OS: A New Unifying Approach Against the Global View Assumption Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 5101/2008, Computational Science – ICCS 2008

Michael Goldweber, Renzo Davoli VDE: an emulation environment for supporting computer networking courses ACM ITiCSE '08 Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, 2008

Renzo Davoli, A poster about View-OS: A process with a ViewPoster at EuroSys2006

Renzo Davoli, UMview: View-OS implemented as a System Call Virtual Machine Poster at 7th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '06)

Renzo Davoli, Michael Goldweber Virtual square (V2) in computer science education Proceedings of the 10th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE 2005),

Renzo Davoli, VDE: Virtual Distributed Ethernet Proc. of First International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the DEvelopment of NeTworks and COMmunities (TRIDENTCOM'05), pp. 213-220, 2005

Renzo Davoli, Virtual SquareProceedings of the First International Conference on Open Source Systems. 2005.