[Fedora-xen] [fedora-virt] Dom0 xen support in Fedora 15?

fcxen user fcxen at itsbeen.sent.com
Fri Nov 12 13:22:03 UTC 2010


Dear Santa,

I don't have much, but I am willing to give up any and all of my Christmas 
presents if you can see your way to bring Christmas to a boy in the UK. You 
see, they have even less there in the UK - surveillance cameras everywhere to 
make sure they keep in line and boiled gruel twice a day if they are lucky. 
There is a boy, Michael, he works ever so hard - first shift at a coal mine 
and then second shift at a textile mill - and then after 2 10 hour shifts of 
backbreaking labor, he only has a couple hours per day by candle light while 
eating his nightly gruel to work on Xen for Fedora.

Mr. Scrooge and the other fat cats at Scrooge, Inc. tell Michael and the rest 
of us that we should be happy with their KVM. This, while dining on the finest 
roasted meats and full cream puddings in front of roaring fires fueled by wood 
gathered by orphans and widows paid in crust of week-old bread while  young, 
robust, well-fed hamsters on whale oiled wheels run their giant gleaming 
servers - you see Santa, our hamsters are gaunt, long-of-tooth and have only a 
portion of Michael's nightly gruel that he is able to share with them and alas 
we have no monies for whale blubber with which to oil their wheels.

The rich seem to believe that we press for Xen only through laziness or 
recalcitrance - I can assure you this is not the case, we have simple needs 
and wants, we ask not for full bodied HVM capable X5680s but only that our 
humble, yet proud and hardworking Core, Pentium and Opterons are not dumped on 
the ground and doused in kerosene that they might never be used again. We are 
not asking for luxury and riches, just humble tools that a man might fashion 
an honest day's work from what he has. These hopes ride on young Michael's 
work. They are not the sole hopes of Michael or me but the hopes of thousands, 
living lives of quiet desperation, hoping beyond hope that one call goes their 
way, of having one branch to grab onto.

Dearest Santa - please don't leave these desperate souls a lump of KVM in 
their stocking.

Thank you and god bless us every one!


On 11/8/10 8:00 AM, Dor Laor wrote:
> On 11/08/2010 04:55 AM, 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?
>
> Have you consider kvm? it's upstream since 2.6.20 and now its more ready
> than ever.
>
>>
>>    	Michael Young
>> _______________________________________________
>> virt mailing list
>> virt at lists.fedoraproject.org
>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/virt
>
> --
> xen mailing list
> xen at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/xen


More information about the xen mailing list