[Xen-devel] Xen running on 32-processor Unisys ES7000

["Vessey, Bruce A" <Bruce.Vessey@xxxxxxxxxx>]

It's past time to tell this mailing list what we've been pursuing.  We
have now successfully run Xen on a 32-processor Unisys ES7000.  For
those of you unfamiliar with the ES7000, it uses Intel Xeon processors
(x86) and contains up to 64 GB of memory.  Because the ES7000 uses a
clustered APIC architecture, it was necessary to make some changes to
the APIC set-up code.  Though the system supports up to 64 GB of memory,
the current version of Xen is limited to 4 GB on x86.

What are our next steps?

(1) We'll release our patches for a 32-processor x86 support.  There are
two patches.  One is a generic issue that applies to any 32-processor
system.  We plan to release that patch immediately.  The second is the
required clustered APIC mode code for the ES7000.  We understand that
Intel is about to release a patch that provides ACPI support (moving it
from Xen itself into dom0), and we're concerned about how/if the two
patches fit together.  Therefore, we would like to get a copy of that
patch ASAP.

(2) We expect that we will also need some additional patches for x86_64.
That will be our next step.  

(3) On x86_64, we want to test with larger memory configurations.

(4) We're interested in support of SMP guests.  We would like to
experiment with various numbers and sizes of SMP guests.

We believe that one of the benefits we'll be able to bring to the Xen
project is testing on larger systems.  Unfortunately we do not have
full-time access to a 32-processor system (we're doing most of our
testing on a 8-processor system) but we're able to schedule time when
required for specific large configuration testing.

Bruce Vessey
Linux Systems Group
Unisys




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