milestone 1c completion

[hmussman@bbn.com]

Per 1Q09 QSR, work started on milestone 1c:

The emphasis of our work has been to create the environment for executing 3rd party experiments, and to define an interface for GENI researchers to upload and define experiments. We have made significant progress and will be demonstrating our work at GEC4.

The first phase of our effort was to implement the OS on our bricks as a Xen host domain (dom0), and to support the execution of guest domains (domU). Once completed, we needed to ensure the guest domain had access to the system networking and peripherals. The solutions that we implemented are listed below.

• Ethernet link. This was solved with the support of Xen guest domains, since Xen

automatically provides support for virtualization (shared access between dom0 and domU) of Ethernet links. Rather than use DHCP to allocate IP addresses, we have implemented a mechanism to assign static IP addresses so that guest domains have well-known addresses accessible through the WiFI access points (APs) attached to each brick's Ethernet port.

• 3G link. The 3G link is used as the DOME control plane. We have chosen to

make the link sharable between dom0 and domU by implementing NAT routing of domU Ethernet traffic. By making the control plane link available to domU, the guest domain has access to a relatively reliable link (about 90% connectivity). Furthermore, this link can enable guest domains to offer opt-in experiment involving transit passengers.

• Atheros WiFi PCI device. We have chosen to hide the PCI address from dom0,

making it visible only to the guest domain. This means the guest domain has full, native access to the WiFi device. All features of the Atheros WiFi card and madwifi driver are available to the guest domain. The guest domain may even install customized a device driver.

• GPS device. We run a gpsd daemon in dom0 that can be accessed from the guest

domain (directly, or via the libgps library).

The second phase of our work was to implement the ability for guest VMs to be installed, scheduled and launched on bricks. To achieve this, we implemented the following.

• A database schema was created that defined the following objects and the

relations between those objects: users (GENI researches, UMass members of the DOME community), files (VM partitions), experiments (one or more partitions and the associated resources, such as the WiFi device), and instances of experiments (the scheduling of experiments).

• A set of server-side scripts was developed to enable bricks to access the DB and

retrieve files from the servers.

• Programs were developed to mange the critical tasks on the bricks.

o dome_pullexperiments: This is a daemon that downloads experiments (i.e., all required files) from a server to a brick. The daemon is designed to deal with the DOME disruptive environment of network disconnections and the powering-down of equipment. Files are downloaded in chunks and progress is checkpointed so that events can be resumed from a known state. The daemon prioritizes downloads based on schedules, and performs garbage collection when disk space becomes a concern. o dome_getexpschedules: This is the daemon that is responsible for making the experiment schedules available to the bricks. o dome_cleanexperiments: This is the daemon responsible for safely removing deprecated experiments from the bricks. o dome_runexp: This is the program that is responsible for launching a guest VM on the brick. It uses input from dome_pullexperiments and dome_getexpschedules to determine the VM to launch. Dome_runexp will create the partitions required by the VM, configure the networking, and make critical information available to the VM. See the Milestone 1b documentation for more information. o Additionally, various utilities (dome_getexpired, dome_killdomu, dome_vmrunning, dome_getrunning) were implemented to monitor the status of guest VMs, and to shutdown VMs.

The above is progress toward our next two milestones. 1c and 1d

Additionally, we have implemented a mechanism for 3rd party experiments (guest VMs) to generate log files, and for the content of the log files to be asynchronously uploaded to arbitrary servers (i.e., sent to user-defined destinations by dom0 when the guest domain is not executing). See the Milestone 1b documentation for more information. Finally, we have implemented the web interface for: uploading files to a server so that they can be staged for installation on buses; defining experiments; and scheduling experiments. This will be shown at GEC4. This effort and the work defined above are intended to be the foundation for integration with ORCA.

[hmussman@bbn.com]

Milestone was completed on 5/27/09, per attached file.

"The virtual environment is functional with access to WiFi, 3G, Ethernet and the GPS."