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

[Pasi Kärkkäinen]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 02:20:19PM +0200, Veli-Pekka Kestilä wrote:
> >>So all in all I think for me this aquisition is good news. I think most 
> >>problems with xen comes from xensource as it's they only product 
> >>generating income and for that reason the opensource version seems to 
> >>get less care than the version you can buy from them. (This is just my 
> >>opinion so it's not necessarily so)
> >>    
> >
> >I think Xensource is putting a lot of effort into opensource Xen.
> >
> >It's just the dom0/pv_ops mess that's causing problems atm.. that _should_
> >get fixed in the near future.
> >
> >  
> I have noticed that. But main reason for my feeling is that they should 
> have started the push much more early than they did. Or maybe it wasn't 
> feasible before. Anyway it's just have been my feeling of the whole 
> thing and I think it's good to have two competing techs as it will 
> provide that both will advance.
> 

Yeah well.. IIRC Xen patches were first sent for 2.6.15 kernel. 
Those were rejected and not integrated into vanilla kernel. I can't remember
the reason for that.   

Next attempt failed when others wanted to have the paravirt ops (pv_ops) framework
instead, which enables Linux kernel PV support for any hypervisor, not just for Xen.

Then it took a while to get the generic pv_ops framework done and merged into Linux
kernel. 

And after that it has taken a lot of time to port the Xen domU from the original "Xenlinux" 
to pv_ops framework. pv_ops Xen domU support has been in mainline Linux kernel since 2.6.23.

And now there is active development going on to get the pv_ops dom0 working
and merged into Linux. Btw Redhat started this work earlier, and it is now
being continued by Xensource (Jeremy Fitzhardinge).

http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps

-- Pasi