A few Xen questions
First, it think it's fantastic that the Fedora Project is considering
bundling a Xen enabled kernel. I know it's only in development now and
likely not etched in stone yet, but nevertheless ... cool.
But I have a few questions, some of which I have educated guess about
the answers. I post them mostly here for discussion, as I suspect that
some things are undecided or unexplored.
1. Uh ... so where are the Xen control tools? I suspect these are
forthcoming, I just wanted to double check.
2. On a somewhat related note, Red Hat at one time bundled a UML kernel
but later stopped (even in an errata kernel for that same release).
What were the reasons for this?
3. I know some basic differences between UML and Xen, but I'm wondering
about the differences in mindshare. How much 'industry' buy-in does
each have? I note that Xen has some support of both HP Labs and Intel
Research Cambridge.
4. Any idea if it will show up in a future version of RHEL as well?
5. On the technical side ... are the changes to the domain0 kernel
running on the raw hardware non-intrusive enough that it may one
day become feasible and/or desirable to just ship the standard
kernel as a Xen-enabled kernel?
6. What is the likelihood that Xen will be included in Linus' kernel
someday? Has anyone solicited Linus' opinion on Xen? I'm curious
because that would mean *two* virtualization technologies that could
potentially interfere with one another, or at least be mutually
exclusive at build time. Not that it would matter much from a practical
end-user perspective ... if you really want to run a bunch of Xen
domains within a UML ... I suppose there are worse ways to torture
yourself ;-).
7. What do people think of the idea of porting Anaconda to run under Xen so
that you can install a full release of Fedora Core (or RHEL) as an
unprivileged guest the way you would normally install the OS? I'm not
exactly volunteering, but I did *almost* have the installer booting within
UML and start to install Red Hat Linux. It bombed out at some point. Can't
remember where. I did it all without hacking any python, IIRC.
--
-Paul Iadonisi
Senior System Administrator
Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
Ever see a penguin fly? -- Try Linux.
GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets