[CentOS-virt] redhat's Qumranet acquisition

Wed Sep 10 08:19:08 UTC 2008
Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik at iki.fi>

On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 01:03:17PM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 12:40 PM, Fabian Arrotin
> <fabian.arrotin at arrfab.net> wrote:
> > Karanbir Singh wrote:
> >>
> >> admin wrote:
> >>>
> >>> So when can we expect KVM/Ovirt to ship as RHEL/CentOS's default
> >>> virtualisation solution?
> >>>
> >>
> >> oVirt itself is in beta now - you should be able to get pkgs and try it
> >> out NOW. and for most part, it works fine ( in the small scope of testing
> >> that I've done personally )
> >>
> >> - KB
> >>
> > Now i understand more why Red Hat is touring (in Europe at least) and busy
> > promoting Virtualization : it seems (if i believe the agenda :
> > http://www.europe.redhat.com/promo/business-partner-training/agenda.php)
> > that oVirt is becoming the tool they want to promote (even more than libvirt
> > in a standalone fashion) , at least that was my perception (especially when
> > you read the event invitation email) .. let's see what the future will be
> > but all people following the Fedora line already saw that kvm became
> > prefered over Xen ... and from a Market-Share point-of-view it's also clear
> > that RH had to push something new to compete against Xen (through Citrix
> > XenServer), Vmware, and HyperV ...
> >
> 
> Actually Red Hat didn't need to do that for competition reasons. The
> big problem is that Xen is stuck on an old kernel and not in mainline.
>  It was getting harder and harder to forward port the kernel mods and
> after 2.6.26 basically became impossible. If Xen spent more energy
> working inside the main kernel.. I don't think the KVM strategy would
> have been followed.
> 

Xensource seems to have a couple of developers working with upstream Linux now.. 
upcoming Linux 2.6.27 will have more Xen domU pv_ops features (64b support
etc), and they're working with getting Xen dom0 pv_ops support merged in..
some groundwork already sent/submitted for 2.6.28.

More information about upstream/pv_ops Linux Xen kernel:
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps

Too bad they didn't start working with that stuff earlier :(

-- Pasi