Xen Introspection Project
The purpose of the Xen Introspection Project is to develop a comprehensive set of APIs allowing developers and solution vendors to have direct access to a variety of monitored features for a specific running virtual machine on a Xen hypervisor. The API set will expose the following types of information for a specific virtual machine:
- Memory and CPU
- Storage
- Networking
- Application Execution Debugging - step control of individual processes or threads
These APIs will enable the following types of solutions:
- Security
- Forensics
- Debugging/Testing
- System Management
- System Recovery/Survivability
Work is already underway at several universities to enable some of these features. Details on this work is detailed below:
Georgia Tech has the XenAccess Library Project; a development project that allows for the introspection of memory and disk access for a specific virtual machine. More information on this project is available at http://groups.google.com/group/xenaccess.
The University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of California at Davis are working on the VIX (Virtual Introspection for Xen) tool suite. An introductory paper on this research is available at http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MSP.2008.134 or http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1368517.
The Xen Introspection Project is a community effort within Xen.org to leverage the existing research presented above with other work not yet public to create a standard API specification and methodology for virtual machine introspection. As there are a variety of topics within this project, the Xen.org community is looking for support from graduate students at various universities looking for interesting and useful thesis projects.
