FC7 XEN 32 bit version.

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 11:36:23AM -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Monday 04 June 2007 11:23:55 Leslie Satenstein wrote:
> > Bugzilla is a reasonably fine tool, but it needs an administrator to scan
> > open bugs and either write them off, or put them into the "fix it up"
> > queue.  November to June and still no 32 bit XEN version... Should I not be
> > frustrated?  
> 
> Honestly you should be thrilled if any Xen stuff work.  Xen is still not 
> upstream and they are stuck on an older kernel at the Xen upstream.  What we 
> have in fedora is a best effort forward port done as fast as it can, but the 
> fact that it works at all in any configuration is pretty impressive to me.

I'd also like to point out that 32-bit Xen in Fedora 7 *does* work on alot
of hardware. We fixed 3 data corruption bugs which have been causing trouble
with our 32-bit Xen kernels shortly before GA, and have also pushed out 
updates to Fedora 6 to solve the same issues. 

These 3 bugs were responsible for > 95% of all crashes people have been
seeing on 32-bit Xen in recent months. Of course we're still not entirely
bug-free, but those which are left only impact a small subset of hardware
out there. 

While we are resource constrained, if you've been following Fedora Xen
development on the fedora-xen mailing list you'll see we recent got a second
engineer working full time on Xen. Eduardo is maintaining & releasing all 
the kernel releases we push to Fedora, while Juan is able to concentrate on 
the merge process tracking LKML & Xen upstreams.

Upstream Xen have also finally ditched their insane 'sparse tree' model
of tracking LKML in favour of full kernel trees. This was to enable people
to track the LKML releases more easily, so things are improving all the 
time..

Dan.
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