FC7 xen status question.

[Naoki]

Howdy,

The xen kernel normally lags behind the mainstream fedora, right now
it's about a month older :

$ rpm -q kernel kernel-xen
kernel-2.6.20-1.3071.fc7
kernel-2.6.20-1.3094.fc7
kernel-xen-2.6.20-2925.5.fc7

So I'm wondering if there is a technical reason for this and if the
versions will sync before FC7 release?

Cheers,

[Pasi Kärkkäinen]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 04:50:52PM +0900, Naoki wrote:
>  Howdy,
>  
>  The xen kernel normally lags behind the mainstream fedora, right now
>  it's about a month older :
>  
>  $ rpm -q kernel kernel-xen
>  kernel-2.6.20-1.3071.fc7
>  kernel-2.6.20-1.3094.fc7
>  kernel-xen-2.6.20-2925.5.fc7
>  
>  So I'm wondering if there is a technical reason for this and if the
>  versions will sync before FC7 release?
>   
And more important thing is that it crashes/freezes for _many_ people.. it's
known to be broken.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=234008

The same bug happens with fc5 and fc6 kernel-xen-2.6.20.

-- Pasi

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 04:50:52PM +0900, Naoki wrote:
>  Howdy,
>  
>  The xen kernel normally lags behind the mainstream fedora, right now
>  it's about a month older :
>  
>  $ rpm -q kernel kernel-xen
>  kernel-2.6.20-1.3071.fc7
>  kernel-2.6.20-1.3094.fc7
>  kernel-xen-2.6.20-2925.5.fc7
>  
>  So I'm wondering if there is a technical reason for this and if the
>  versions will sync before FC7 release? 
The reason is that upstream Xen is still stuck on 2.6.18, and thus once
again we have the task of forward porting Xen to the current Fedora kernel
which is (almost) 2.6.21 :-( We had the same task in FC6, but the port
from 2.6.18 -> 2.6.21 is proving much more troublesome because there has
been some major refactoring in upstream kernels that interacts with Xen
in subtle & troublesome (ie crash-prone) ways.

I don't expect any major updates to kernel-xen beyond trying to fix the
known problems/bugs. We aim to keep the kernel-xen build as close to the
bare-metal kernel as possible, but in Fedora 7 development we took the
decision to de-couple baremetal & Xen kernel RPMs to avoid holding up
progress in baremetal. So until upstream Xen actively tracks the LKML
releases I don't expect we'll have 100% sync in versions of the kernels.

The good news is that at the Xen Summit last week XenSource have promised 
to change the way they manage their kernel trees to track LKML more closely
as of Xen 3.0.6. So perhaps we'll be able to get back in sync for Fedora 8

Regards,
Dan.
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