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What are people using it for?
UML can run basically anything that the host can, so it's possible to
split a physical system into a bunch of independent virtual machines.
Some examples:
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David Coulson is
running an entire network of UMLs, the public face of which is
usermodelinux.org, which is running in one of them. He has
written an paper on his adventures
here.
He also has a nice UML monitoring and control daemon which we intend
to steal and use for umlcoop.org. Information about that can be found
here.
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I've mirrored this site and the UML downloads in a
UML
running on a UML server set up by Bill Stearns.
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There are a number of commercial UML hosting providers now. These are
the ones that I'm aware of:
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Kernel development and debugging
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This kernel allows developers to write and debug
code using the normal process-level tools, like gdb, gprof, and gcov.
Also, developers who are away from their normal environment can carry
on development, using a UML virtual machine as their kernel testing box.
There is more information here on
building this kernel
from source and debugging
it, plus a
debugging session
transcript.
The eXtreme Programming methodology says that testing should be run
frequently, and automatically. This can be hard to do with kernel
code, but UML makes this just another set of processes. The Linux
FreeSWAN team is using FreeSWAN enabled User-Mode-Linux to do nightly
testing of IPsec and DNSsec code. This is run nightly, the results of
which is regularly published.
Perhaps surprisingly, UML is also occasionally useful for debugging
user-level processes. Ever get a odd error from a system call and
have no idea why it's happening, either because there are a dozen
reasons that errno could be returned and the documentation doesn't
list the one you're hitting or, according to the documentation, the
errno is completely inexplicable? Well, fire up UML, set a breakpoint
on the system call in question, run your program, and you'll see very
quickly why it's failing.
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Safely playing with the latest kernels
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Since the user-mode kernel is not running directly
on the hardware, it has no access to it unless you provide it. So,
if the kernel contains any nasty bugs, like file corruption bugs, it
can't hurt any data that you care about.
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Trying out new distributions
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Its filesystems are contained in files in the underlying filesystem,
so any time you want to boot a new distribution, you only need to
dedicate a file to it, not an entire disk partition. The
project download page has a number of
ready-to-go root filesystems loaded with various distributions,
including SuSE, Slackware, Debian, and Red Hat.
UML is a great teaching tool, especially in courses where students
need a dedicated machine in order to get the most out of it. I know
that UML is being used to teach OS development, network
administration, and more general system administration. These are all
cases where having a virtual machine to practice on is far more
convenient for everyone than using physical boxes.
I know of a number of universities which are running courses on OS
internals and networking using UMLs. There is also a company
offering
Linux system administration courses inside UMLs. Also see the
O'Reilly
and
usermodelinux.org stories on this.
The kernel runs in a virtual machine that can be configured in ways
that your physical machine can't. It can have more memory, more
devices, and, soon, more processors. So you can do development and
testing of hardware capabilities even when you don't have the relevant
hardware.
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Poking around inside a running system
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Since you have a full OS running outside UML, it's pretty easy for the
terminally curious to find ways of looking inside this kernel that are
impossible for a native kernel.
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As a secure sandbox or jail
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Processes inside the user-mode kernel have no access to the hosting
machine or to the outside world that's not explicitly provided. So, a
malicious application running inside it can do no harm to anything
that matters.
UML virtual machines are networkable, to each other, to the host, and
to other physical machines. So, UML can be used to set up a virtual
network that allows setting up and testing of experimental services.
See the networking
tutorial and virtual network
screenshot for more information.
Testing of some types of software requires booting up a machine. With
UML, this can be very easily automated. There is a small test harness
available , consisting of a small perl module
implementing a UML object which provides methods to boot a virtual
machine, log in to it, run commands, and shut it down.
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Disaster recovery practice
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Do you know what you would do if your machine suddenly didn't boot one
day? With UML, you can set up virtual disasters and practice
recovering from them. This doesn't have to be serious business - it
can also be fun. Ever wonder what happens when you run
UML# rm -rf /
but been afraid to try it? Now you can with impunity.
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A Linux environment for other operating systems
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This is more a potential use, since UML only runs on Linux right now.
But once it's ported to another OS, it is a completely authentic Linux
environment - it will run any Linux executable. This would be an
interesting shortcut for an OS vendor looking for Linux binary compatibility.
See the projects page for more information on
porting UML to other operating systems.
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It doesn't need to be good for anything. It's fun!
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