Re: [Pkg-xen-devel] Xen status in lenny?
On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 02:54:09PM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> On 15/07/08 at 14:01 +0200, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:
> > Xen is just one solution to virtualisation. I may agree that a general
> > decision to support virtualisation on Debian could be a policy decision, but
> > whether we'll support one specific technology, for which there are many
> > alternatives, is very much a technical decision. Does it work, can we get it
> > to work and do we have the people to keep it work after release?
>
> Debian supported Xen in etch. Which of the "many alternatives" should
> Debian recommend to its users currently running a Debian dom0 in
> paravirt mode?
>
> I don't think that any of the alternatives are valid candidates yet:
> - Linux-Vserver, OpenVZ: clearly not the same use case.
> - Virtualbox, qemu: poor performance under some workloads.
> - KVM: is very promising but is it really a valid alternative *now*
> for current Xen users?
>
One big difference between Xen and KVM is the fact that KVM always requires
hardware virtualization (HVM) support from the CPU.
Xen doesn't need that for paravirt guests (linux).
Xen still is the most feature rich hypervisor.. that might change some day,
of course.
The biggest advantage of KVM is that it's included in vanilla kernel..
Hopefully Jeremy Fitzhardinge (from Xensource) and others can get the
important Xen kernel features ported to pv_ops framework and integrated
into vanilla linus kernels soon..
Status/todo:
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps
Redhat/Fedora pv_ops Xen kernel dom0 support status:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvopsDom0
-- Pasi
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