[Haskell-cafe] [ANN] Bindings to Xen Control (xenctrl.h)

[Thomas M. DuBuisson]

Don,
I'll throw future work ideas in the next releases cabal.  The most
obvious doors opened are Haskell rewrites of the current Xen
infrastructure (virt-install, xm, xend).  Slightly more interesting
tasks could be (warning: random thoughts):

1) HAPPS server that can manage Xen domains (without requiring python
libs or System.cmd)
2) Network or BSD socket based remote management programs in Haskell.
haxr or session-types might be of use here.
3) With the functions that can alter the CPUs availability, more complex
rules or sharing arrangements could be implemented.  Same concept
applies to other resources such as PCI and memory allocation.  Seeing as
Xen doesn't over-commit memory, a guest VM program that detects low/high
memory situations and reports to the host for policy controlled
balloning (adjustment of VM allocated memory) would be kind of fun...
but probably complete overkill for any user of Xen.

Right now I think the bindings are enough for an 'xm' replacement but
nothing more.  I've over doubled the number of functions bound just now.
There will probably be regular releases for the next few weeks as I find
time.

Thomas

On Sat, 2008-05-31 at 23:31 -0700, Don Stewart wrote: 
> thomas.dubuisson:
> > All,
> > I'm just getting started with hsXenCtrl [1] as both a fun way to play
> > with Xen and become proficient with Haskell FFI.  Once I get my
> > community.haskell.org account squared away I'll likely setup a public
> > darcs repo (and a homepage somewhere).
> > 
> > As for modules: I intend to expand on the trival FFI bindings in
> > System.Xen.CBindings and there'll be a higher level interface in
> > System.Xen (functions will standardize on returning Either or throwing
> > exceptions, hiding the xc_handle open/close, etc).
> > 
> > Typical Disclaimers:
> > The _only_ thing I've actually done with this, just tonight, is pause /
> > unpause domains.  API is subject to change!  Only my exact build of Xen
> > is sure to work, and no promise even then.
> > 
> > TomMD
> > 
> > [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/hsXenCtrl
> 
> Good stuff. Perhaps the synopsis should include a link or description of
> the typical use cases/ thinks we might achieve?
> 
> -- Don