Hi all, This is a head-up to let you know, that as part of
6851808 Stop delivering 32-bit dom0 http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6851808 we're going to stop delivering 32-bit xen.gz and the disk and networking backend drivers used in dom0 at or around the same time we putback the 3.3 port that's been ongoing. This work is currently targeting nv_125. The rationale is explained in the bug report, which I'll reproduce here: -- Description: There is a desire to stop delivering the 32-bit xVM hypervisor in OpenSolaris. Machines that typically run xVM have many guests, one of the central roles of virtualization (to consolidate many physical machines). The limitations of a 4gb address space make it unfeasible to support many modern OS guests on 32-bit systems. To add, these small systems become a maintenance and testing burden for the test and development team: time that would be better spent adding features to 64-bit dom0 or improving performance and quality. Removing the 32-bit hypervisor and dom0 will not have any effect on guests - we can still run 32-bit guests on a 64-bit dom0. It is proposed to do this work in two stages: * stop delivering the hypervisor itself and the kernel backend drivers * stop delivering the 32-bit binaries for the userland components This bug addresses the former. The latter is a little more complex as some of the userland components are currently tied to 32-bit by /usr/bin/virt-manager, which itself depends on a library from a separate Consolidation that is only delivered compiled as 32-bit -- Other than upgrading to 64-bit capable hardware, for users still interested in virtualization on 32-bit machines, the options are: * OpenSolaris Containers, if using the same kernel version in the guest and host (or using one of the branded zones if they support the version of Solaris you need) * VirtualBox for Linux, Windows and other guests operating systems After this change, the error message you would see if you were to try to boot from an xVM grub entry on a 32-bit machine would look like: --------------------------------- findroot (BE_snv_125,0,a) Filesystem type is zfs, partition type 0x82 bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-1 kernel$ /boot/$ISADIR/xen.gz loading '/boot/$ISADIR/xen.gz' ... Error 15: File not found Press any key to continue... --------------------------------- Feedback to [email protected] is welcome. We'll send a wider-reaching flag-day message when the change integrates. cheers, tim _______________________________________________ xen-discuss mailing list [email protected]
