[Fedora-xen] Status of Xen on FC6 2.6.20.x

[Jeff Layton]

On Tue, 22 May 2007 01:33:00 +0100
"Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 05:55:47PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 09:41:26AM -0700, John Casey wrote:
> > > Can someone tell me or give me a pointer to the status of Xen on FC6 kernel
> > > 2.6.20.x?    I've read about and experienced some serious instability on
> > > 2.6.20.x and was wondering when a stable release was expected.    All of the
> > > threads I've read say to use Xen on 2.6.18, but since Xen is not a critical
> > > requirement for me, I'd like to wait until it comes out on 2.6.20 (or FC7)
> > > which ever comes first.  
> > 
> > F7 is arriving real soon now and will be  Xen 3.1.0 + 2.6.20 kernel. This
> > kernel will fix the 3 core kernel-xen bugs that are being experianced by
> > most people (one 32-bit data corruption issue, 2 SMP bugs).
> > 
> > We're going to apply these same patches to the FC6 kernel-xen which should
> > also resolve the stability issues seen on the FC6 2.6.20 builds. I don't
> > have an exact timeframe for this, but it should be in updates-testing at
> > least fairly soon.
> 
> By fairly soon, I in fact mean 'now' :-)
> 
> kernel-2.6.20-1.2952.fc6  has just hit updates-testing which has the following
> fixes, so go forth & test...
> 
> 
> * Tue May 15 2007 Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost at redhat.com>         1.2950
> - Xen kernel: added patch to initialize pda properly on smp_prepare_cpus()
> * Mon May 14 2007 Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost at redhat.com>
> - Xen kernel: added patch from Stephen C. Tweedie. Fix crashes and
>   hangs, by making critical_fixup_table correct. 
> 
> 

I've done a bit of testing with kernel-xen-2.6.20-1.2952.fc6 and it
*does* seem to fix up the horrible instability I was seeing on i686.
The only issue I've seen with this kernel is that my machine hangs just
after "System halted" on shutdown (it never powers off). I'm thinking
that that's likely unrelated to the HV fixes, however.

-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton at redhat.com>