nixpkgs/pkgs/applications/virtualization/xen

Xen Hypervisor

This directory includes the build recipes for the Xen Hypervisor.

Some other notable packages that compose the Xen Ecosystem include:

• ocamlPackages.xenstore: Mirage's oxenstore implementation.
• ocamlPackages.vchan: Mirage's xen-vchan implementation.
• ocamlPackages.xenstore-tool: XAPI's oxenstore utilities.
• xen-guest-agent: Guest drivers for UNIX domUs.
• win-pvdrivers: Guest drivers for Windows domUs.

Updating

Automatically

An automated update script is available in this directory. To produce up-to-date files for all supported Xen branches, simply run ./update.sh, and follow the instructions given to you by the script. Notably, it will request that you verify the Xen Project code signing PGP key. This README understands that the fingerprint of that key is 23E3 222C 145F 4475 FA80 60A7 83FE 14C9 57E8 2BD9, but you should verify this information by seeking the fingerprint from other trusted sources, as this document may be compromised. Once the PGP key is verified, it will use git verify-tag to ascertain the validity of the cloned Xen sources.

After the script is done, follow the steps in For Both Update Methods below.

Downstream Patch Names

The script expects local patch names to follow a certain specification. Please name any required patches using the template below:

0000-project-description-branch.patch

Where:

1. The first four numbers define the patch order. 0001 will be applied after 0000, and so on.
2. project means the name of the source the patch should be applied to.
   • If you are applying patches to the main Xen sources, use xen.
   • For the pre-fetched QEMU, use qemu.
   • For SeaBIOS, use seabios.
   • For OVMF, use ovmf.
   • For iPXE, use ipxe.
3. description is a string with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and dashes. It describes the patch name and what it does to the upstream code.
4. branch is the branch for which this patch is supposed to patch. It should match the name of the directory it is in.

For example, a patch fixing xentop's output in the 4.15 branch should have the following name: 0000-xen-xentop-output-4.15.patch, and it should be added to the 4.15/ directory.

Manually

The script is not infallible, and it may break in the future. If that happens, open a PR fixing the script, and update Xen manually:

1. Check the support matrix to see which branches are security-supported.
2. Create one directory per branch.
3. Update the default.nix files for the branches that already exist and copy a new one to any branches that do not yet exist in Nixpkgs.
   • Do not forget to set the branch, version, and latest attributes for each of the default.nix files.
   • The revisions are preferably commit hashes, but tag names are acceptable as well.

For Both Update Methods

1. Update packages.nix with the new versions. Don't forget the slim packages!

2. Make sure all branches build. (Both the standard and slim versions)

3. Use the NixOS module to test if dom0 boots successfully on all new versions.

4. Make sure the meta attributes evaluate to something that makes sense. The following one-line command is useful for testing this:

   xenToEvaluate=xen; echo -e "\033[1m$(nix eval .#"$xenToEvaluate".meta.description 2> /dev/null | tail -c +2 | head -c -2)\033[0m\n\n$(nix eval .#"$xenToEvaluate".meta.longDescription 2> /dev/null | tail -c +2 | head -c -2)"
   

   Change the value of xenToEvaluate to evaluate all relevant Xen packages.

5. Clean up your changes and commit them, making sure to follow the Nixpkgs Contribution Guidelines.

6. Open a PR and await a review from the current maintainers.

Features

Pre-fetched Sources

On a typical Xen build, the Xen Makefiles will fetch more required sources with git and wget. Due to the Nix Sandbox, build-time fetching will fail, so we pre-fetch the required sources before building.¹ To accomplish this, we have a prefetchedSources attribute that contains the required derivations, if they are requested by the main Xen build.

EFI

Building xen.efi requires an ld with PE support.²

We use a makeFlag to override the $LD environment variable to point to our patched efiBinutils. For more information, see the comment in ./generic.nix.

Tip

If you are certain you will not be running Xen in an x86 EFI environment, disable the withEFI flag with an override to save you the need to compile efiBinutils.

Default Overrides

By default, Xen also builds QEMU, SeaBIOS, OVMF and iPXE.

• QEMU is used for stubdomains and handling devices.
• SeaBIOS is the default legacy BIOS ROM for HVM domains.
• OVMF is the default UEFI ROM for HVM domains.
• iPXE provides a PXE boot environment for HVMs.

However, those packages are already available on Nixpkgs, and Xen does not necessarily need to build them into the main hypervisor build. For this reason, we also have the withInternal<Component> flags, which enables and disables building those built-in components. The two most popular Xen configurations will be the default build, with all built-in components, and a slim build, with none of those components. To simplify this process, the ./packages.nix file includes the xen-slim package overrides that have all withInternal<Component> flags disabled. See the meta.longDescription attribute for the xen-slim packages for more information.

Security

We aim to support all security-supported versions of Xen at any given time. See the Xen Support Matrix for a list of versions. As soon as a version is no longer security-supported, it should be removed from Nixpkgs.

Caution

Pull requests that introduce XSA patches should have the 1.severity: security label.

Maintainers

Xen is a particularly complex piece of software, so we are always looking for new maintainers. Help out by making and triaging issues, sending build fixes and improvements through PRs, updating the branches, and patching security flaws.

We are also looking for testers, particularly those who can test Xen on AArch64 machines. Open issues for any build failures or runtime errors you find!

Tests

So far, we only have had one simple automated test that checks for the correct pkg-config output files.

Due to Xen's nature as a type-1 hypervisor, it is not a trivial matter to design new tests, as even basic functionality requires a machine booted in a dom0 kernel. For this reason, most testing done with this package must be done manually in a NixOS machine with virtualisation.xen.enable set to true.

Another unfortunate thing is that none of the Xen commands have a --version flag. This means that testers.testVersion cannot ascertain the Xen version. The only way to verify that you have indeed built the correct version is to boot into the freshly built Xen kernel and run xl info.

---

1. We also produce fake git, wget and hostname binaries that do nothing, to prevent the build from failing because Xen cannot fetch the sources that were already fetched by Nix. ↩︎

2. From the Xen Documentation:

   For x86, building xen.efi requires gcc 4.5.x or above (4.6.x or newer recommended, as 4.5.x was probably never really tested for this purpose) and binutils 2.22 or newer. Additionally, the binutils build must be configured to include support for the x86_64-pep emulation (i.e. --enable-targets=x86_64-pep or an option of equivalent effect should be passed to the configure script).

   ↩︎