Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond
Hi,
----- "Michael Tautschnig" <mt@debian.org> wrote:
> First of all, I'd like to say a big THANKS to all the people
> maintaining Xen
> within (in of course also outside) Debian; you really saved us lots of
> money and
> energy (which is both, electrical and that personal one).
>
> [...]
>
> >
> > > 4) What will be our preferred server virtualization option for
> non-Linux
> > > guests after squeeze? Still KVM?
> > Yes, virtualized Windows works much better in (modern) KVM than
> Xen.
> >
> > > 5) Do we recommend that new installations of lenny or of squeeze
> avoid
> > > Xen for ease of upgrading to squeeze+1? If so, what should they
> use?
> > It depends. KVM in lenny is buggy and lacks important features.
> While it
> > works fine for development and casual use I do not recommend using
> it in
> > production for critical tasks.
> > This is where Red Hat really beats us: RHEL shipped Xen years ago
> but
> > recently they released an update which provides a backported and
> > stabilized KVM.
> >
> > > 6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way? What
> can I do
> > > to help with this point?
> > Remind people that Xen is dying and KVM is the present and the
> future.
> >
>
> As I understand the later mails of Bastian and Ian, this is probably
> not an
> issue anyway, but still I'd like to note it: Even though KVM may have
> a
> promising future (on hardware with virtualization support, at least),
> there is a
> serious need for a nice migration path. It seems impossible to
> dist-upgrade to
> squeeze and switch from Xen to KVM at the same time.
Such a migration path already exists: xenner, but it needs to be packaged,
and possibly updated to work with newer Xen hypercalls (such as those introduced
since Xen 3.1).
I am looking into packaging xenner already as a backup plan if I cannot
manage to fix some major reentrancy problems in the Xen dom0 code (Xensource
2.6.18 patches, the pvops stuff has it's own share of problems and needs
more evaluation).
William
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