[CentOS-virt] Need Help with Xen Please

[Karanbir Singh]

Kai Schaetzl wrote:
>> What specifically is better about 3.2 that you are recommended it over
>> 2.6.18?
> 
> AFAIK, you cannot run 32bit guests on 64bit hosts and the HVM support also 
> lacks in the stock CentOS version (which is a 3.0.3/3.1 mix). 

afaik, you would be wrong on both those counts. 5.2 still has 'preview 
only' 32bit on 64bit dom0 - but it does work and works fine for me on 2 
diff machines.

> As I'm not 
> using both I can only reflect what others say. The latest version in 5.2 
> may also have some patches that Xen 3.2 has and thus works better.
> You are also getting the xenstore and it's functionality and better 
> networking scripts (the virtual network interface structure changed 
> significantly) with it. There were a lot of improvements from 3.0.3/3.1 to 
> 3.2.

yes, that is clearly visible - much changes have gone into the 3.2 tree 
- but there is near zero maintenance work being done upstream, so once 
you are on the grindstone, you might need to stay on that in order to 
get the fix's you need. Also, the xen developers really seem to be 
loosing the plot with little or not real efforts being made to 'upstream 
xen foo'. Putting the distro buffer between myself and the technology 
makes me feel good too :D specially since I have a few xen machines in 
production now.

> My experience to date with CentOS is it tends to run the
>> latest, proven stable version of each package, which would make me
>> hesitant to run downloaded packages.
> 
> That specific package from xen.org runs really well, but you also have to 
> add two or three patches.

on the flip side, I have much higher stability working with the distro 
packages, since i dont need to patch anything and the tooling works well 
too.

- KB
-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/  : 2522219 at icq