"Andrew M.A. Cater" <amaca...@galactic.demon.co.uk> writes:
> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 04:53:56PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote: >> Hi folks, >> >> There was a thread here a little while back about the status of Xen in >> future Debian releases. It left me rather confused, and I'm hoping to >> find some answers (which I will then happily document in the wiki). >> >> According to http://wiki.debian.org/SystemVirtualization : >> >> "Qemu and KVM - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops" >> > Yes - but also the only game in town for cross platform emulation. > > KVM is shaping up well and appears to be very well supported by Red Hat. But still slower and less secure due to qemu. >> "VirtualBox - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops" > > Who knows what will happen to this now that Oracle own it? It's possible > it will be merged in one of their other products like Virtual Iron. > >> >> "Xen - Provides para-virtualization and full-virtualization. Mostly used >> on servers. Will be abandoned after squeeze." >> > > I think that the problem here is that Xen isn't mainstream in the > kernel. It takes a long time for a Xen-ified kernel to come out and any > distribution supporting it has to carry a heavy patch burden. Xen > doesn't keep anywhere current in terms of kernel - if we release Squeeze > this year with kernel 2.6.3*, Debian will have to maintain all the patches > / "forward port" them to 2.6.32 or 2.6.33 as was done with 2.6.2*. I think we can all agree that the old style xen patches from 2.6.18 and forward ported to newer kernels in lenny are unmaintainable. But the pv-ops xen kernel is shaping up well and that is what Bastian Banks is working on. They have a proper upstream and follow the latest vanilla kernel well enough. According to the wiki the plan is to have pv-ops merge into vanilla with 2.6.34. >> The Xen page on the wiki makes no mention of this. >> >> So, I am wondering about our direction in this way: >> >> 1) Will a squeeze system be able to run the Xen hypervisor? A Xen dom0? >> >> 2) Will a squeeze system be able to be installed as a Xen domU with a >> lenny dom0? What about squeeze+1? >> >> 3) What will be our preferred Linux server virtualization option after >> squeeze? Are we confident enough in the stability and performance of >> KVM to call it such? (Last I checked, its paravirt support was of >> rather iffy stability and performance, but I could be off.) >> >> 3a) What about Linux virtualization on servers that lack hardware >> virtualization support, which Xen supports but KVM doesn't? >> > > Which servers that lack hardware virtualisation support - > pretty much everything made in the last two or three years has it. For > servers, > specifically, the likelihood is that - Lenny has a 2 year life + 1 year, > Squeeze has ? year life + 1 year - by the time you get to Squeeze + 1 > anything that doesn't will be almost ten years old. QEMU will work. > Non-Intel - ARM, PPC ... may be another matter. Just end of last year I bought myself a nice POV/ION330 board (Atom 330 cpu) with 4GB ram. Makes no noise, eats little power and can decode movies in hardware. The ideal desktop for a non-gamer. But no kvm support. There are still a lot of cpus being made that don't have hvm. And systems are being used longer than 10 years too. My Amiga is coming up on 20 years. :) Hey, even last years I saw someone asking about actual i386 support. And what about ia64? Does kvm support that? >> 4) What will be our preferred server virtualization option for non-Linux >> guests after squeeze? Still KVM? >> >> 5) Do we recommend that new installations of lenny or of squeeze avoid >> Xen for ease of upgrading to squeeze+1? If so, what should they use? >> > > New Squeeze - use KVM? New Lenny - whatever you want, because at this > point you have (days until release of Squeeze + 1 year) to find an > alternative. > >> 6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way? What can I do >> to help with this point? >> >> Thanks, >> >> -- John >> >> > > Just my 0.02c > > AndyC MfG Goswin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/874ol4e1vi....@frosties.localdomain
