What was the reason for enabling Xen on all i386 kernels?
I would like to know why it was decided to enable Xen on all i386
kernels. The changelog simply states it was done, which isn't exactly
helpful, other than to show it apparently was on purpose and not an
accident.
Meanwhile amd64 kernels don't have it enabled. Why the difference?
Perhaps I am wrong, but I suspect the majority of users don't give a
darn about xen support, while on the other hand quite a lot of people
are quite annoyed at loosing the ability to use a lot of kernel modules
that made their machines actually do what they wanted to do. Certainly
the nvidia and ati drivers are broken by this, and I am not sure how
much convincing it would take to get either of them to fix it. I
wouldn't be surprised if ndiswrapper is broken by this either, although
I haven't used that lately.
So really what is the point of making all kernels xen enabled when
almost noone will actually use that feature, while at the same time
causing lots of grief for a much larger group of users? Was having
seperate xen flavour kernels really that big a deal?
The only reason I seem to have found so far is in bug 473645 which to me
looks like this was done entirely to make life easier for the debian
installer team so that they can do testing under xen. If that's the
case, well the d-i team just took priority over actually using the
system by a much larger group of users. Sure the d-i is important, but
so is actually being able to use the system. Could we at least have
some kernel images built without xen, even if they aren't the default so
that we can still use the system for what we want without all users
having to go and start building custom kernels. I for one am not
looking forward to going back to that, but if I have to, then I will. I
highly think this change should be reconsidered.
--
Len Sorensen
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