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 |
[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.
[edit] User's documentation
Core Documentation
Tutorials
- VDE Basic Networking
- Umview with umfuse
- Umview networking: UMlwip
- Running foreign code
- Virtually partitioned Virtual Disks
- Time/uname and other virtualities
Advanced Tutorials
- Remote command execution on umview with overlapped filesystem
- Port forwarding inside umview environment
- Creating VLANs with multiple vde switches
- Managing Fast Spanning Tree Protocol on vde networks
Useful links
- VDE project on sourceforge
- View-OS project homepage at Sourceforge
- Virtual Square site: ideas of Evolution
- 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.
[edit] Virtual Square Bibliography
Renzo Davoli, Michael Goldweber View-OS: Change your View on Virtualization. Proc. of Linux Kongress, 2009
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.
[edit] Documentation in progress
This section contains beta of documents that will be included in the Wiki.
Lost in the View-Space: how to know in which View you are
vdetelweb: Telnet and Web management for VDE
Multi stack support for Berkeley Sockets
UMNET: user mode virtual multi stack support
(Experimental) Public VDE Networks
Virtual NetManager: visual front-end to manage virtual networks
umview/kmview as login shells: give each user his/her own view


