On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 06:43:14PM +0000, Ned Slider wrote:
Brett Serkez wrote:
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 10:45 AM, Vandaman vandaman2002-sk@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Do people have wet underwear for nothing over XEN?
See http://www.redhat.com/promo/qumranet/
As far as CentOS is concerned saying Xen is deprecated is jumping the gun. CentOS ships with Xen and as long as upstream supports it, CentOS by extension supports it.
Thank you for the clarification.
What isn't clear from reading the above referenced material is if Xen will be included in future CentOS releases.
Which is why I originally wrote...
"*Some* are interpreting this... as an indication that xen will be dropped from RHEL6 as they direct their efforts towards KVM."
*If* xen is not included in RHEL6 then it will, by definition, be deprecated in favour of KVM irrespective of whether (or not) RH continues to support it throughout the life of RHEL5. Note that xen was dropped (not deprecated, dropped) in Fedora 10, read into that what you will :)
Xen is NOT dropped in Fedora 10. Fedora 10 contains xen-hypervisor, xen-tools/libs and domU kernel.. and of course all the usual virt-tools.
Fedora 10 does not include dom0 capable xen kernel. Fedora 9 didn't include that either. Fedora 8 is the latest Fedora release (at the moment) to include Xen dom0 support.
Fedora 9 and Fedora 10 both contain Xen domU capable kernels, and they can be used as Xen guests/domUs.
The reason why F9/F10 do not include Xen dom0 kernel is the fact that dom0 support is not yet included in mainline/vanilla Linux kernels. Fedora didn't want to forward-port separate non-mainline patches for dom0 support.
This is currently being worked on, and pv_ops dom0 support is currently planned for inclusion in Linux 2.6.29.
See: http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps And: http://xenbits.xen.org/paravirt_ops/patches.hg/ (for latest pv_ops dom0 patches)
Fedora will re-add Xen dom0 support into the kernel when it's included upstream.
So xen isn't technically deprecated yet, but if I were a betting man, I wouldn't be putting all my eggs in a virtualized xen basket.
Some might choose to call that FUD, and that's their prerogative. In a way they're right as Red Hat's statement on xen does contain elements of uncertainty and doubt as they have not committed to continued ongoing support of xen past the current RHEL5 product lifecycle, and that may make some fearful for it's long term future within the Red Hat landscape.
It's interesting to see what will happen.. At the moment Xensource is actively working on getting pv_ops based dom0 support into vanilla Linux kernels.
The lack of dom0 support in the standard upstream kernel is the only reason why Fedora 9/10 do not ship with Xen dom0 support.. afaik.
(Efforts needed to continuously forward-port Xenlinux dom0 patches from 2.6.18 to current 2.6.2x kernels was too big pain to handle.)
-- Pasi