Greetings All,

Hope that everyone is doing well today. After a long hiatus away, I am finally back to work on an XCP-ng project that got side tracked and hopefully I will be able to get it running soon.

I have Ubuntu 24.04 (x64) up and running and some test hardware for the project so what I need to do is to set up the build environment so that I can build the release "net-install" ISO to start with so that I can learn the process.

Is there any documentation as all I could basically locate in the Github repo was a "Build Environment" but not much detail or documentation.

UPDATE: I may have just found some information at:

https://github.com/xcp-ng/create-install-image
and
https://github.com/xcp-ng/xcp-ng-build-env

Any help and guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks and have a great day, my friends.

Hi All,

After a long hiatus from things, I am finally getting back to some work on my XCP-ng project.

Can someone please give me an idea as to the freshly installed XCP-ng size on disk?

I have an idea about using an UEFI Ramdisk to load the entire contents from an externally compressed XCP-ng install into ramdisk and run from there.

Mostly just investigating ideas at this point, but think that could be a viable approach to making a Live XCP-ng system such that the VMs could be stored on SSD, HDD, or NAS perhaps.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks and have a great day.

Hi All,

I am a diehard minimalist and have been investigating Alpine-Xen that uses "xl" as well as XCP-ng which uses "xapi".

In particular, I really like the features in XCP-ng but like the RAM-based bootable ISO LiveCD of Alpine-Xen.

A while back, I started to investigate if it might be possible to build out an ultra-thin (i.e. say perhaps less than 200MB if possible) version of XCP-ng but seem to recall that there were some limitations on going that route due to the heavy requirements of XCP-ng or something like that although could be mistaken.

In any case, I wanted to revitalize this effort and re-example XCP-ng and Alpine-Xen for possible selection to build from and would like to get any suggestions or opinions from the community on this as well.

Any thought would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

@stormi Actually you are correct and it is call "xen"

https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Compiling_Xen_From_Source

I see that on the XCP-ng 8.2 ISO that you are using a variant of the 4.13 Xen hypervisor. I think that is where I will start my reading up on things.

Thanks again and I appreciate your help

@stormi Thanks for the link as I had come across that documentation which seems to be great for building the packages the XCP-ng distribution itself.

Since some of what I want to investigate is this ideas of a "console" passthrough as well as the "qemu vnc" core components so that I can see if it is going to be possible to add an RDP server within the hypervisor so I am looking to build the XenServer hypervisor itself after I get a feel for the code. At least that is where I am guessing that I need to start.

Really, not sure if any, or all of this is possible, but wanted to see if I can give it a try, or maybe have to see if I can possibly contract an XCP-ng developer and pay him to help with the initial PoC (Proof of Concept) project if I can find one somewhere. Do you know any, by chance that might be interested?

Thanks again and have a great day

Are there any steps for pulling and building the xenserver core hypervisor?

Just wanted to see if there is any documentation to get things going here.

@olivierlambert Awesome. Now I can track the "qemu VNC" implementation below the API which I think will be within the actual Xenserver code, as a guess.

Also, I may look into what it might take to implement some type of "console" passthrough to a DomU UserVM instead of the Dom0 ControlVM as that is the other part of the equation that I will need as well. It would probably be an additional nice feature for users if this console passthrough idea allowed for some type of HotKey sequence so users can to cycle through their running VM's consoles on the local host machine if it is not running headless. Just a thought but it could be nice as well, I think.

@olivierlambert Thanks.

Yea, I am learning that it is actually a distro as you mention since there are many packages and components. I think that this is going to be a real challenge just to try and figure out where an RDP server may be able to fit into the distro to interface with the actual hypervisor.

I wanted to just browse the server code to see if there was anything hard coded and related to VNC or if those were general console hooks which become VNC specific at the API level.

I did search for VNC at the repo link and it seems that a lot of VNC information comes back as well as a lot of QEMU relations.

Still learning though.

Hi All,

I have been reading up and browsing around the Github (xenserver) at:

https://github.com/xenserver

but I cannot seem to located the actual XCP-ng hypervisor (xenserver) although I did find some older dated forked versions.

Also, I am trying to find out how the vncterm fits into the scheme ofthings.

Thanks in advance

@olivierlambert I also just did not see the actual Hypervisor repo on the XCP-ng Github (https://github.com/xcp-ng)

Thanks my friend. You are so very helpful to me as I endeavor to get deeper ingrained into XCP-ng.

Hi All,

While still being a noob to XCP-ng and digging into the documentation lately for another related question that I have, I have become a little confused as to what exactly is the "relationship" between XCP-ng and the XenServer Hypervisor.

Please forgive me if this is totally incorrect, but it seems that the XenServer is put out by Citrix as opensource (?) and then the XCP-ng project is adding open-source components that were not release by Citrix. As such, the XCP-ng project does not actually develop on the hypervisor itself, but on the support and API components.

Does this sound correct?

Maybe there is some better documentation somewhere that can clear this up since I would like to try and do some development for and RDP server that can be used with XCP-ng instead of the VNC server to interface with the VM consoles.

Also, I would like to investigate the possibility of having some type of "console" passthrough such that a user VM (DomU) can have a GUI running that controls the console (i.e. Video, Audio, Mouse, Keyboard, etc..) until software switched to another DomU VM or back to the Dom0 Control VM.

These are the 2 projects that I would like to try and work on and if successful in making them work then contributing the code back to the XCP-ng or XenServer project.

The problem I have is that, at least so far, I am not clear as to what roles XCP-ng plays in the grand scheme of things.

Can someone please help to clarify?
Thanks in advance.

For the effort start, I have come across reasonable RDP stuff from the FreeRDP project as well as OGON.

FreeRDP (https://www.freerdp.com/)
OGON (https://github.com/ogon-project/ogon)

The FreeRDP project has a simplified shadow server that might be used as the basis for an RDP server and the OGON project as a similar, but more advanced, type server that also allows for plugable modules in that it could be used for RDP and even SPICE in the future, if I remember correctly while I think that they have VNC already coded up.

My thoughts are to find out where XCP-ng currently handles all of the VNC stuff for the hypervisor which I think that @olivierlambert just sent the link so as to see if it might be possible to build out probably the OGON server from there to allow supporting the VNC, RDP, and SPICE multiple protocols.

I will take some time, but if all goes well then the user should be able to connect to any of the VM consoles (Linux, Windows, etc.) with any of these protocols and not have to do it from within the Guest VM.

At least that is goal
Cheers

@olivierlambert Thanks for the link and I will look into it more to see how the VNC server and API hooks to the hypervisor are setup inside XCP-ng to get a feel for what may, or may not, be achievable.

Also looks like I will need to read up on using Ocaml since it seems to have been written in that language.

Thanks again

@olivierlambert As part of the XCP-ng team, can you please point me in the right direction for where the source codes is located for the VNC implementation?

Eaykoc from an earlier reply point me to

https://github.com/xenserver/vncterm

But as I do not yet know how the actual XCP-ng server code is laid out, I am wondering if there is where the VNC hood are driven from within the hypervisor?

@olivierlambert Well, I think that SPICE is not yet widely adopted in the industry yet whereas RDP pervades throughout the industry. My thoughts are that as SPICE becomes the norm then it can be added as well, at which point the out come would be to have VNC, RDP, and SPICE as available options to the XCP-ng users.

@eaykoc Thanks for the link and I will look into it more. I am still a bit of a noob as well and need to get a feel for the XCP-ng (xenserver) code layout along the way.

@olivierlambert and @S-Pam Thanks for the response on this and I have to agree with @S-Pam in that XOA supporting RDP is not completely what I am interested in as I wanted to investigate the possibly extending the XCP-ng to have RDP as well as VNC working across all VM's and possibly writing up the C/C++ drivers for RDP.

Not sure how challenging that would be, but I am assuming that the same XCP-ng hooks that the current VNC libraries use could be used by RDP libraries as well.

Hi All,

I have just installed XCP-ng and have been doing a lot or reading with more to go.

I see that XCP-nG uses VNC to connect to the User VM's (DomU) and it go me wondering about what it might take to compile up RDP analogs so that XCP-ng could offer VNC or RDP for connection to remote VM's.

Obviously, I tend to think that RDP is a much more powerful protocol and there is even the rdesktop, Remina, and FreeRDP projects that work well. The power of RDP is that it allows for things to be done in channels and thus you can have all types of channels to include video, audio, USB, shared drives, printers, etc. which is far more than VNC is capable of doing, from what I have seen so far.

With this in mind, I was wondering where the source code was located so that I might be able to investigate the writing up an RDP module that might get included or offered as an optional addon since I could definitely use it myself even now.

Any guidance or information on this would be greatly appreciated as I am new to XCP-ng and would like to explore the actual code-base with a particular interest in where the VNC code lives.

Best Regard and Thanks in advance.
Lonnie

Hi All,

Actually what I think that I am looking to patch into XCP-ng is a way to have a "console" Passthrough which I think would do the job perfectly.

I am developing a PoC project using XCP-ng just for a heads up so some questions may sound non-standard but in my mind I have a rationale for looking in that direction so any help that you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again

@jedimarcus Thanks for getting back to me on this. My idea is to have a DomU VM running on the console so that I can display its GUI and interact with that User VM directly. Of course, I do realize that XCP-ng was not strictly designed for that and know that the User DomU VM's are usually remoted into via VNC or possibly RDP, I would like to see if it is possible to get a DomU VM to control the console instead of the Dom0 Control Domain for local and direct use of that DomU at the physical system.

I think that it is possible, but just have to find out how.
Thanks agian