XL

Introduction

As of Xen 4.1 xl is the default toolstack supplied as part of the Xen release. The older xend toolstack is still available in tree but is considered deprecated and may eventually be removed.

xl is based on the xenlight library (libxl), a library designed to provide a common "bottom third" for any Xen toolstack.

Features

• PV and HVM guests.
• Basic guest lifecycle operations: create, shutdown, reboot, pause, unpause, list, rename etc.
• Guest device support, including hotplug and unplug:
  • Network devices (both para-virtualised and emulated)
  • Block devices (both para-virtualised and emulated)
  • Virtual framebuffer, keyboard and mouse both para-virtualised and emulated)
    • Including SDL, VNC and SPICE output
  • PV console devices
• Live migration and save/restore of guests,
• Passthrough of PCI devices to guests.
• VCPU pinning
• CPU pools, including cpupool-per-NUMA node.
• Control of CPU scheduler parameters
• TMEM
• XSM/Flash policy control.
• Control of CPUID features exposed to guests.
• Support for both the traditional Xen for of qemu (qemu-xen-traditional) and upstream qemu versions (qemu-xen)

Anti-Features

The following are explicitly not supported by xl:

• Managed Domains (a la xm vm-create). Suitable alternatives: xapi, which is available as part of XCP or via Project Kronos or libvirt or some very simple scripting (e.g. the xendomains initscript).
• Python code in configuration files. See: PythonInXlConfig

Documentation

This section contains link to Xen manual pages that are generated from the Xen codebase. They reflect the state of xen-unstable.hg. We do not yet have versions for specific Xen releases, but will have them in future

Document related to xl and xl.cfg	Description
xl(1)	Xen management tool, based on LibXenlight
xl.cfg(5)	XL Domain Configuration File Syntax
xl.cfg(5), disk configuration	This document specifies the xl config file format disk configuration option.
xl.cfg(5), network configuration	This document specifies the xl config file format vif configuration option.
xl.cfg(5), tsc_mode configuration	In Xen 4 a new config option called tsc_mode may be specified for each domain. This document is targeted for Xen users and administrators that may need to select a non-default tsc_mode.