Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 07:01:59AM +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 04:53:56PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > There was a thread here a little while back about the status of Xen in
> > future Debian releases. It left me rather confused, and I'm hoping to
> > find some answers (which I will then happily document in the wiki).
> >
> > According to http://wiki.debian.org/SystemVirtualization :
> >
> > "Qemu and KVM - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
> >
> Yes - but also the only game in town for cross platform emulation.
>
> KVM is shaping up well and appears to be very well supported by Red Hat.
>
> > "VirtualBox - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
>
> Who knows what will happen to this now that Oracle own it? It's possible
> it will be merged in one of their other products like Virtual Iron.
>
> >
> > "Xen - Provides para-virtualization and full-virtualization. Mostly used
> > on servers. Will be abandoned after squeeze."
> >
>
> I think that the problem here is that Xen isn't mainstream in the
> kernel. It takes a long time for a Xen-ified kernel to come out and any
> distribution supporting it has to carry a heavy patch burden. Xen
> doesn't keep anywhere current in terms of kernel - if we release Squeeze
> this year with kernel 2.6.3*, Debian will have to maintain all the patches
> / "forward port" them to 2.6.32 or 2.6.33 as was done with 2.6.2*.
>
Xen folks are creating 'xen/stable' branch for the pv_ops dom0 kernel,
which is tracking the long-term supported 2.6.32 kernel, which Squeeze
will ship. Currently it's at 2.6.32.9.
So Xen dom0 support for Squeeze shouldn't be as problematic as the
Lenny 2.6.26 kernel was. (no other distro shipped 2.6.26 and it was
not a long-term maintained kernel).
Now it would be a good time for everyone to test and report any problems
found from the pvops dom0 kernel; it's still a WIP (Work In Progress),
and requires both the success and problem reports.
-- Pasi
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