[CentOS-virt] installing xen on c7

Mon Feb 29 14:14:27 UTC 2016
George Dunlap <dunlapg at umich.edu>

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 12:52 PM, Yamaban <foerster at lisas.de> wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Feb 2016 13:20, Scot P. Floess wrote:
>> On Sat, 27 Feb 2016, Karanbir Singh wrote:
>>>  On 27/02/16 01:41, Scot P. Floess wrote:
>>> > >  From George's original email, I had to:
>>> > >    * Install centos-release-xen from centos-extras
>>> > >  Then a yum update followed by a yum install xen.
>>> > >  That worked for me...
>>> >
>>>  i had to do something similar, but my question is - one cant run xen
>>>  without the kernel, so why not have the xen package require the xen
>>>  kernel as a prereq ?

I mostly took the packages as I got them; and for C6, "yum install
xen" always just grabbed the newer kernel automatically; but this was
apparently because of the version, not because of any advertised
capability it provided.

> IMHO, the best way to solve this would a additional line in the spec-file:
> "Provide: kernel-dom0" for those kernel that are provide this functionality.
>
> Then the xen-packages could "Require: kernel-dom0"
> no matter which way the kernel functionality came to be.

This seems like a good idea.  If anyone wants to send pull requests to
https://github.com/CentOS-virt7/xen and
https://github.com/CentOS-virt7/xen-kernel implementing the change
I'll be happy to merge them.  Otherwise I'll put it on my to-do list.

> Maybe ask even across distros for such a implemention,
> to get a more coherent experience for xen.

I just looked at the Fedora xen package, and it doesn't seem to have
any requirement of that sort.  I think most distro kernels just have
Xen enabled by default, because it's a lot harder to support two
packages than just have it enabled all the time.  RH is the odd one
out to have it disabled entirely.

 -George