Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond
On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 01:34:24PM +0200, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> 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.
>
Latest 'status report' of Xen pvops dom0 kernel git trees here:
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2010-03/msg00162.html
There's "xen/stable-2.6.32.x" branch now.
-- Pasi
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