On Thu, 2 Dec 2010, W. Michael Petullo wrote:
Moving forward and for the purposes of Fedora 15 development, can we get both patched 2.7.37/38 kernels that support DomU and raw upstream kernels? Or does xen/next-2.6.27 not have the requisite features yet anyway?
xen/next-2.6.37 doesn't currently have kernel drivers for either block or network backends. Userspace block or network backends may be possible but I don't know how to get them to work, though it is supposed to be possible.
This kernel works as expected with one exception. The exception has been a nagging problem, but I have not reported it because 1) we are using a research OS in DomU and 2) we are not clear if the problem is in our code, Linux or Xen. But, here are the symptoms:
Occasionally (this seems to correlate to network activity between Dom0 and DomU), the system becomes unresponsive. I am running the Michael Young kernel at runlevel 3 within Dom0 (very little memory used by applications). Our OS runs in DomU and is constrained to 128MB of memory. When the system is unresponsive, typing a character into a Dom0 console take 2-5 seconds to appear on the screen. Likewise, other activity is extremely slow. As I mentioned, we have not been able to isolate where the problem is. Running, for example, an OpenWrt Linux build in DomU does not have this problem.
I have seen something similar, though I don't know where the fault lies either.
Michael Young