What's next

Tomorrow I'll try to get the test environment up and running (with a patched more recent kernel version). And during the week I'll also set this up on a machine at home, such that I can develop at home as well. If all goes well I'll start looking into creating a little python program that already gathers the information for one of the parameters.

First day & Planning

Yesterday was the first day of working on this project, the objective of the day: setting up the test environment according to a tutorial made by Sam Verboven.
An outline of this installation process:

1. Download a pv-ops enabled kernel, patch it with the xenoprof patch, compile and install it.
2. Download Xen 3.4.3-testing, compile and install it (also add a Grub entry for Xen).
3. Boot to Xen and create a new Ubuntu 9 image using the xen tools (and make sure this VM runs correctly).
4. Install (Xen)OProfile and make sure the profiling features work correctly.

An overview of the steps required to build the application:

1. Updating the test environment by installing a patched more recent kernel version
2. Make a Python (rapid prototyping, efficient for string operations) tool that gathers the desired parameters from the selected tools:
   • Xen Trace for CPU usage, blocked, waiting and allocation
   • XenoProfile for cache hits and misses
   • SSH connection to VMs (DomU Kernel) for disk block reads/writes, requests/s and average wait and service times
3. Extend the gathering tool with a parser that actually parses and formats the gathered data
4. Make sure running the tool introduces little overhead to the system
5. Make the application even more black-box by finding a way around getting the IO data through SSH connections to the VMs
6. Modify XenMon such that the data can be observed through a GUI