Xenprobes, a Lightweight User-Space Probing Framework for Xen Virtual Machine

This paper presents Xenprobes, a lightweight framework to probe the guest kernels of Xen Virtual Machine. Xenprobes is useful for various purposes such as as monitoring real-time status of production systems, analyzing performance bottlenecks, logging specific events or tracing problems of Xen-based guest kernel. Compared to other kernel probe solutions, Xenprobes introduces some unique advantages. To name a few: First, our framework puts the the breakpoint handlers in user-space, so it is significantly easier to develop and debug. Second, Xenprobes allows to probe multiple guests at the same time. Last but not least, Xenprobes supports all kind of Operating Systems supported by Xen.