[Fedora-xen] Plans for paravirt_ops kernel-xen

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Mar 06, 2008 at 09:28:05PM +0200, Pasi K?rkk?inen wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 06, 2008 at 03:29:17PM +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > Hi,
> >         Fedora's Xen hackers have been working hard towards switching
> > our kernel-xen package from a forward-ported Xensource kernel tree to a
> > state-of-the-art upstream, paravirt_ops based, kernel in Fedora 9 as
> > described here:
> > 
> >   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvops
> >   http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/2007-November/msg00106.html
> > 
> >         Some great progress has been made, and tomorrow's rawhide will
> > have a kernel-xen update with:
> > 
> >   + A very recent 2.6.25-rc4 base
> > 
> >   + Xen paravirt_ops DomU from upstream
> > 
> >   + x86_64 Xen paravirt_ops DomU support
> > 
> >   + Paravirt framebuffer
> > 
> >         However, although the Dom0 paravirt_ops work is well advanced at
> > this point, we still don't have backend drivers or x86_64 Dom0 working.
> > 
> >         With the feature freeze looming next week, we have make the
> > difficult decision to focus the Fedora 9 efforts on DomU and postpone
> > the inclusion of paravirt_ops Dom0 support.
> >
> 
> First I'd like to thank you guys for doing this work. I think it's very
> important to get good Xen support working and integrated into upstream kernel.
> 
> Was there some specific problem/bug about dom0 support (backend drivers and
> x86-64), or just not enough time? 

Simply lack of time - stability of DomU is of most importance because we
can't change the $INSTALL_TREE/images/xen/{vmlinux,initrd.img}  once F9
is released. So we need to prioritize DomU support.  Pushing out a new
kernel to add Dom0 is trivial post-GA since it doesn't impact installer
images.

Dan.
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