nixpkgs/pkgs/by-name/xe/xen

Xen Project Hypervisor

This directory begins the Xen Project Hypervisor build process.

Some other notable packages that compose the Xen Project 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.
• xtf: The Xen Test Framework.

Updating

Manually

1. Update the package.nix file for the latest branch of Xen.

   • Do not forget to set the branch, version, and latest attributes.
   • The revisions are preferably commit hashes, but tag names are acceptable as well.

2. Make sure it builds.

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

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

   echo -e "\033[1m$(nix eval .#xen.meta.description --raw 2> /dev/null)\033[0m\n\n$(nix eval .#xen.meta.longDescription --raw 2> /dev/null)"
   

5. Run xtf --all --host as root when booted into the Xen update, and make sure no important tests fail.

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

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

Features

Generic Builder

buildXenPackage is a helpful utility capable of building Xen when passed certain attributes. The package.nix file on this directory includes all important attributes for building a Xen package with Nix. Downstreams can pin their Xen revision or include extra patches if the default Xen package does not meet their needs.

EFI

Building xen.efi requires an ld with PE support.¹

We use a makeFlag to override the $LD environment variable to point to our patched efiBinutils. For more information, see the comment in pkgs/build-support/xen/default.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.

Security

We aim to support the latest version of Xen at any given time. See the Xen Support Matrix for a list of versions. As soon as a version is no longer the newest, it should be removed from Nixpkgs (master). If you need earlier versions of Xen, consider building your own Xen by following the instructions in the Generic Builder section.

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.

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1. 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).

   ↩︎