Re: [fedora-virt] Dom0 xen support in Fedora 15?
M A Young wrote:
I am trying to work out whether it is practical to propose Dom0 xen
support as a feature for Fedora 15.
The kernel situation is that Domain 0 has been accepted upstream for
2.6.37. Assuming a 3 month kernel release cycle, F15 will most likely ship
with a 2.6.37.x kernel, with 2.6.38 coming out either after the F15
release or just before but too late to be included. If the plan to get key
xen drivers into 2.6.38 succeeds, then F15 may be become usable as a
Domain 0 system at some point during its lifetime as the kernel package in
a Fedora version typically has one major update.
If the kernel team accept backported patches then it might just be
possible to ship F15 with usable Domain 0 support but the timescale for
that would be very tight.
The other thing we would need to consider is what needs to be done to make
xen friendly enough to be usable by an ordinary user. The page
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvopsDom0 contains plans from
when dom0 xen support was expected to make a quick return to Fedora, but
they are a couple of years old now so probably need updating.
I think as a minimum we would need a way to add a dom0 enabled grub entry
for a kernel, rather than requiring the user to hand edit the grub file.
We should also make sure that xen works with the other Fedora
virtualisation tools.
What do others think about this? For example is it achievable as a
feature, is it too early and better to wait for F16, and what else should
we aim to do to make xen usable in Fedora?
Michael Young
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IMO, the pieces that the Xen folks have to whip into shape are the tools;
the missing kernel pieces are fairly well known (backend drivers), although Xen folks
are considering blkback in userspace instead of kernel space, so that may be
a new twist.
So, getting Xen support in the following 2 userspace tools is critical: qemu &
libvirt;
the latter means a new interface to xen libxc (dropping xend), so xen fixes can be
tracked to latest xen upstream. I've seen a fair amt of activity to add xen support
to upstream qemu; I haven't been following libvirt devel to see if xen support to
libxc has been active or not (but would like to hear if so).
- Don