Fedora 16 Final Release Criterion for Xen DomU

[David Nalley]

On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 2:09 PM, Tim Flink <tflink at redhat.com> wrote:
> Since the beta criterion for running Fedora as a Xen guest (DomU) was
> removed for Fedora 16, there has been some discussion [1] [2] on test@
> about whether or not we should add it back for Fedora 16 final. The old
> criterion read:
>
>  The release must boot successfully as a virtual guest in a situation
>  where the virtual host is running a supported Xen implementation
>
> As it stands, we are leaning towards accepting it as at least an NTH
> criteria for Fedora 16. This means that any Xen guest issues would
> become at least NTH (ability to update past code freeze, does not
> block release) for final. The reasons listed are:
>
>  - If Fedora is not usable as a Xen guest at release time, it will not
>   be possible to use the released install media to create Xen guests.
>   This is not fixable through updates
>  - Several cloud platforms (EC2, Linode etc.) use Xen in their
>   platforms. It is possible that issues preventing the usage of Fedora
>   as a Xen guest could affect the ability to use Fedora on those
>   platforms.
>
> Are there any objections to moving forward with this? There seems to be
> no objections from the kernel maintainers who have been participating
> in the discussion on test@ but we wanted a bit more devel input before
> moving forward.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Tim
>
> [1]
> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/103127.html
> [2]
> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-October/103242.html
>


So I'll disclaim that I am employed by Citrix - though not working on
Xen/XenServer/XCP.  I think that I'd have this opinion regardless of
employer.

I don't think we can dismiss the ability to have Fedora run on the
hyerpvisor that powers (by most accounts) 80% of the public clouds.
Amazon, RackSpace, Linode, Tata, IDCF, and virtually every other major
compute cloud services provider is using Xen of some sort as their
hypervisor. Even if that list was only Amazon AWS, I'd say it's still
too large to ignore. Effectively if Fedora doesn't work on Xen it
likely means it doesn't work in the cloud which hardly strikes me as a
reasonable expectation. I'd personally argue that this should be more
than a NTH, but my view tends to be pretty cloud-centric these days.

--David