XL vs Xend Feature Comparison

The following compares the featureset of the xend toolstack vs the xl toolstack as of Xen 4.2.

	xm / xend	xl
Guest Types
PV guests	✓	✓
HVM guests	✓	✓
Guest lifecycle operations
Create, shutdown, reboot	✓	✓
Pause, unpause	✓	✓
List, rename	✓	✓
Live migration and save/restore	✓	✓
Guest device support
Network devices (both para-virtualised and emulated)	✓	✓
Block devices (both para-virtualised and emulated)	✓	✓
Sharing storage across DomU's via w! in virtual machines configuration files	✓	✗ [ 1 ]
Virtual framebuffer, keyboard and mouse (both para-virtualised and emulated)	✓ (includes SDL & VNC support)	✓ (includes SDL, VNC & SPICE support)
SPICE framebuffer/console support	✗	✓
QXL graphics device support for SPICE	✗	✗
PV console devices	✗	✓
PCI device passthrough	✓	✓
VGA graphics device (GPU) passthrough	✓	✓
SCSI LUN/Host passthrough (PVSCSI)	✓	✗
USB 1.1 device passthrough via config file (using qemu xen traditional)	✓	✓
USB 1.1 device passthrough via config file (using upstream qemu)	✓	✓
USB 1.1 device passthrough via hotplug (using qemu xen traditional)	✓	✗
USB 1.1 device passthrough via hotplug (using upstream qemu)	??	✗
USB 2.0 device passthrough (PVUSB)	✓	✗
Device Model Support
Qemu Xen Traditional Device Model	✓	✓
Upstream Qemu Device Model	✗	✓
Stub domain Qemu Xen Traditional Device Model	✓	✓
Stub domain Upstream Qemu Device Model	✗	✗
CPU pools	✓ (undocumented in XEND man pages)	✓
Cpupool-per-NUMA node.	✗	✓
Control of CPU scheduler parameters	✓	✓
TMEM	✓	✓
XSM/Flash policy control	✓	✓
Control of CPUID features exposed to guests.	✓	✓ (syntax greatly improved)
Managed Domains	✓	✗ [ 1 ]
Python code in configuration files	✓	✗ [ 1 ]

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^{[ 1 ]} Feature is explicitly not supported by xl, see XL Anti-Features

Also See:

• XL
• XEND
• Choice of Toolstacks
• Short video overview: XM to XL: A Short, But Necessary, Journey