XL vs Xend Feature Comparison

From Xen

The following compares the featureset of the xend toolstack vs the xl toolstack as of Xen 4.4 and 4.5.

xm / xend xl
Guest Types
PV guests
HVM guests
PVHVM guests
PVH guests
Guest lifecycle operations
Create, shutdown, reboot
Pause, unpause
List, rename
Live migration and save/restore
Remus Integration [ 4 ]
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 in disk settings [ 1 ]
Virtual framebuffer, keyboard and mouse (both para-virtualised and emulated) [ 6 ] [ 6 ][ 7 ]
SPICE framebuffer/console support
QXL graphics device support for SPICE [ 2 ]
PV console devices
PCI device passthrough
VGA graphics device (GPU) passthrough
SCSI LUN/Host passthrough (PVSCSI) [ 2 ]
Qemu USB device passthrough via config file (using qemu xen traditional)
Qemu USB device passthrough via config file (using qemu upstream)
Qemu USB device passthrough via hotplug (using qemu xen traditional) [ 3 ]
Qemu USB device passthrough via hotplug (using qemu upstream) [ 3 ]
Qemu USB device passthrough support for USB 1.1
Qemu USB device passthrough support for USB 2.0 (qemu upstream)
Qemu USB device passthrough support for USB 3.0 (qemu upstream)
PVUSB USB 2.0 device passthrough for both PV and HVM guests [ 3 ]
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 [ 2 ]
Misc Features
CPU pools [ 5 ]
Cpupool-per-NUMA node.
Control of CPU scheduler parameters
TMEM
XSM/Flash policy control
Control of CPUID features exposed to guests. (syntax greatly improved)
Features that are explicitly not supported in XL
Managed Domains [ 1 ]
Python code in configuration files [ 1 ]

[ 1 ] Feature is explicitly not supported by xl, see XL Anti-Features
[ 2 ] Feature will be exposed in a future release
[ 3 ] Feature development has started in the Xen 4.5 release cycle, but did not get completed
[ 4 ] See Remus Toolkit Differences
[ 5 ] Undocumented in XEND man pages
[ 6 ] Includes SDL & VNC support
[ 7 ] Includes SPICE support

Also See: