Inter-domain communication for XAPI

In the future we will have

1. storage driver domains
2. network driver domains
3. qemu stub domain(s)
4. ... various other helper domains (e.g. possibly a domain running pygrub)

The XCP toolstack already has several pieces including:

1. xapi: handling resource pools
2. squeezed: applying ballooning policy
3. xenopsd: (new) "babysitting" running VMs on a host
4. perfmon: monitors alerts based on performance measurements

We currently use a set of ad-hoc protocols for inter-process communication including

1. XMLRPC
2. xenstore "rpc"
3. JSONRPC

We desire to standardise on a particular messaging/RPC system which

1. is available everywhere and very easy to use from many different source languages
2. promotes location-transparency (so we don't suffer when a service is moved from dom0 to a domU)

Proposal: DBUS

[DBUS|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Bus] is a simple IPC system originally designed for graphical desktop environments. It supports

1. a message broker which can buffer messages and start receiving services on demand
2. an IDL supporting both basic types (string, int etc) and structured types (arrays, structs)
3. languages including: C, python, ocaml
4. location-transparency via a notion of a "well-known bus address" (like org.xen.foo) used to identify services

It is also the system used by XCI.

Useful links:

1. [d-feet|http://live.gnome.org/DFeet]: a pygtk-based object inspector
2. http://wiki.meego.com/D-Bus/Overview: an overview, including instructions for using d-feet

Concrete example

Consider a simplified XCP system containing the following services:

1. xapi: running in a domU, handling XenAPI calls from clients
2. xenopsd: running in dom0, performing start/shutdown/... on running VMs
3. storage: running in a domU i.e. a storage driver domain