On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 11:18:41AM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote: > >> "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*. > > I think we can all agree that the old style xen patches from 2.6.18 and > forward ported to newer kernels in lenny are unmaintainable. > > But the pv-ops xen kernel is shaping up well and that is what Bastian > Banks is working on. They have a proper upstream and follow the latest > vanilla kernel well enough. According to the wiki the plan is to have > pv-ops merge into vanilla with 2.6.34.
Let's not concentrate too much on having dom0 support in mainline, because that is not a panacea - we (Debian) just need a stable Xen patch that tracks the current stabler-mainline branch or whatever we're targeting for our stable release, and has some sort of a forseeable future maintenance path. We have shipped .26 patches in lenny and they turned out to be really buggy in some cases (domU .26 kernels with vcpus >= 1 can get random freezes on .26 dom0), and it's not getting fixed because that patch branch is EOL'd. That's worse of a problem for users than some theoretical later abandoning. Since we're concentrating on .32 now, the paravirt_ops branch looks good, because Xen upstream agreed to form their own .32 stable branch of that. So whether they succeed in a mainline merge for .34 or .35 or .36 or even later, that's irrelevant, we will still have support for the squeeze kernel. -- 2. That which causes joy or happiness. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100227175041.gc18...@orion.carnet.hr