Dom0 xen support in Fedora 15?

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 7:12 PM, M A Young <m.a.young at durham.ac.uk> wrote:
> I am trying to work out whether it is practical to propose Dom0 xen support as
> a feature for Fedora 15.
>
> The current situation is that patches to allow a kernel to boot as a xen
> Domain 0 are in 2.6.37 but they aren't enough to run a reasonable xen
> guest system from it. The xen developers are aiming to get enough drivers
> accepted in 2.6.38 so that you can run at least basic guest machines.
>
> Given the roughly 3 month kernel release cycle, I would expect Fedora 15
> to ship with a 2.6.37.x kernel, with 2.6.38 coming out at around the time
> of the Fedora 15 release but too late for it to be included, and that
> Fedora 15 will move to 2.6.38 at some later point. Thus Fedora 15 should
> be usable as a xen Domain 0 at some point in its life cycle.
>
> However for xen dom0 support to be a Fedora 15 feature we would really
> need to have the appropriate drivers in the kernel when Fedora 15 ships,
> so my main question is how likely is it that backported xen drivers would
> be accepted into the Fedora kernel? I would also be interested in any
> other comments on this proposal.

I don't think backported drivers would be the right approach.  There
are several times where large backports of function have caused issues
in the upgrade path or otherwise been painful.

I won't comment on Xen overall, but it certainly doesn't seem like a
suitable feature for F15.  Best case I would recommend F16.

josh