[Fedora-xen] Goodbye Xen on RH/Fedora?

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Wed Jan 21 12:19:31 UTC 2009


On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 01:12:52PM +0100, Jan ONDREJ (SAL) wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 11:50:39AM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 09:20:48AM +0100, Jan ONDREJ (SAL) wrote:
> > > KVM is still not a replacement for paravirtualized machines and I think
> > > fully virtualized KVM will be slower like a paravirtualized XEN.
> > 
> > KVM is a great replacement for Xen.  It's much easier to use for a
> > start -- no more rebooting into a completely separate kernel^W
> > hypervisor.  As long as you have the virtio drivers in the guest,
> > which is the default for all new Linux distros, performance is roughly
> > the same.
> > 
> > > Also I am missing some howtos for migration to KVM/xenner.
> > 
> > Install a recent Linux kernel in the guest, adjust the configuration
> > file[1], and reboot.  You only need Xenner if you want to run the Xen
> > PV guest unchanged (ie. without installing a new guest kernel).
> 
> For F10 there is no need to change domU kernel. It's same.
> 
> But after reboot to KVM, my virtual machine has an 8139 network card.
> Is it paravirtualized? How I can tell my machine to use "virtio" drivers?

You have to tell the host to give the guest a virtio network card -
change the NIC <model type='virtio'/> as described here:

http://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html#elementsNICS

The guest needs to have a relatively up to date kernel which has
drivers for the virtio network card - that's included in all recent
Linux kernels (virtio_net.ko).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top




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