--- On Thu, 11/25/10, Bill Davidsen <davidsen(a)tmr.com> wrote:
Patrick Bartek wrote:
> --- On Sun, 11/14/10, Bill Davidsen<davidsen(a)tmr.com>
wrote:
>
>> Patrick Bartek wrote:
>>> [snip]
>>>
>>> That's okay as long as the OS is "current"
when it is
>> installed and will be supported for those 5 years
or
>> so. (I'm not a cutting edge type of
person. It
>> matters little to me whether something is new or
old as long
>> as it works and satifies my requirements.) I
wouldn't
>> install, say, CentOS 5, on a new or old system
today and not
>> expect problems, either today or later.
That's why I'm
>> waiting for CentOS 6 or Debian 6, etc. to be
released before
>> doing anything to my current 4 year old
system--Fedora 12
>> 64-bit.
>>>
>> I will probably be using CentOS-5.5 or later until
CentOS-7
>> comes out. RHEL6 is
>> dropping xen, and the little utility boxes I seem
to build
>> for firewall or
>> similar don't have HVM and can't support KVM.
Hopefully xen
>> will be back in
>> mainline soon, and people will have a choice how
they want
>> to run things.
>
> I think you're SOL expecting XEN to be reinstated
after being so resoundingly dropped in favor of KVM by
Redhat. I vaguely remember reading a press release
about it.
>
> Wait for CentOS 7? Going to be long wait.
5 years(?), at least. But patience _is_ a virtue. ;-)
>
If xen goes in mainline, and it is certainly on track to do
so, then Fedora 15
(or 16 at the latest) may offer it again. It allows
operation on processors
which lack HVM, which is not only old gear (my Celeron
systems and laptops), but
alternate vendors, appliances, and misguided systems
killing HVM in BIOS to meet
MSFT license requirements.
While trying to find the press release from RH about dropping XEN and why (found this
instead:
http://virtualization.info/en/news/2008/06/red-hat-adopts-kvm-what-happen...),
noted that RHEL 6 Final was release about 2 weeks ago, and the default virtualization is
KVM. Do you really think Red Hat is going to switch back to XEN for 7 after all the work
that went into finalizing 6? Of course, XEN probably will be available as an alternative,
but you'll have to recompile the kernel. XEN is still listed in the F12 repo.
Depending on what you run in a VM, there may be performance
issues in xen vs
HVM, harder to say with Linux, since it might run
paravirtualized anyway.
I used to run qemu and its accelerator load module with a stock kernel on a 1GHz Duron
machine with 1.5 GB RAM (Its max) in Slackware, Fedora Core 3, 4, 5, & 6. It worked
quite well, although, it wasn't in a server environment, just experimentation. I
hated having to multi-boot to test distros or run Windows. To make a long story short, I
never liked the way XEN was implemented.
B