End of life for FC12?

Bill Davidsen davidsen at tmr.com
Sat Nov 27 00:54:17 UTC 2010


Patrick Bartek wrote:
> --- On Thu, 11/25/10, Bill Davidsen<davidsen at tmr.com>  wrote:
>
>
>> Patrick Bartek wrote:
>>> --- On Sun, 11/14/10, Bill Davidsen<davidsen at 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-happens-to-xen.html), 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.
>
I don't think "switch back" is the right term, once the support is in mainline 
it becomes a few more builds in a sea of thousands, so it might be like PAE and 
non-PAE kernels. Having it allows use on additional machines, as the effort to 
have the capability goes down and the effort to remove or disable it goes up, 
the possibility goes up.

There is a lot of stuff with a small user base in Fedora, and the users tend to 
be more diverse in their hardware (I'm being very polite here), so low effort 
support seems consistent with users vs. resources. And with all the effort which 
has gone into a better desktop, offering some solution to netbook users with no 
HVM has some justification.

I have no crystal ball, but I own or support a fair number of netbooks. I have 
no thought that xen would continue as long as a custom kernel is needed, but 
once that's no longer the case, we'll see.

>> 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.
>


-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot


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