Xen Developer Summit 2015

As part of the process of building Xen, the current build system clones multiple external git trees and compile them. For example Seabios and QEMU are imported using this mechanism. The process is unfriendly to Linux distributions, which have the requirement of building each component just once, and is unfriendly to users, who often find it confusing and inflexible. A new tool was created to solve this problem.

This talk will introduce Raisin: a source distribution system for the Xen Project. Raisin offers a generic framework to deploy any Xen related projects from source. Currently it supports QEMU, SeaBIOS, OVMF, Linux, Libvirt and blktap, but is very easy to extend. Raisin also helps developers by providing quick validation tests that can be run against local changes.

The presentation will explain the goals of the project, the current status, and the best ways to use it.