On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 7:12 PM, M A Young <m.a.young(a)durham.ac.uk> wrote:
I am trying to work out whether it is practical to propose Dom0 xen
support as
a feature for Fedora 15.
The current situation is that patches to allow a kernel to boot as a xen
Domain 0 are in 2.6.37 but they aren't enough to run a reasonable xen
guest system from it. The xen developers are aiming to get enough drivers
accepted in 2.6.38 so that you can run at least basic guest machines.
Given the roughly 3 month kernel release cycle, I would expect Fedora 15
to ship with a 2.6.37.x kernel, with 2.6.38 coming out at around the time
of the Fedora 15 release but too late for it to be included, and that
Fedora 15 will move to 2.6.38 at some later point. Thus Fedora 15 should
be usable as a xen Domain 0 at some point in its life cycle.
However for xen dom0 support to be a Fedora 15 feature we would really
need to have the appropriate drivers in the kernel when Fedora 15 ships,
so my main question is how likely is it that backported xen drivers would
be accepted into the Fedora kernel? I would also be interested in any
other comments on this proposal.
I don't think backported drivers would be the right approach. There
are several times where large backports of function have caused issues
in the upgrade path or otherwise been painful.
I won't comment on Xen overall, but it certainly doesn't seem like a
suitable feature for F15. Best case I would recommend F16.
josh