On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 08:15:00AM +0000, Evan Lavelle wrote: > It seems I've been a bit thick. It's been pretty obvious recently that > Xen isn't flavour of the month around here, but I assumed there were > good reasons for that. Now, rather belatedly, I've found > > http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2008/qumranet.html > > In short, RedHat paid $107 million for Qumranet in September 2008. The > acquisition includes KVM. > > I've got 2 years invested in Xen, on FC8, and I can't help feeling that > I've been shafted. Am I alone? The acqusition of Qumranet has had absolutely *zero* impact on the availability Xen kernels in Fedora. The sole reason for not having Xen support in Fedora 9/10 is that the Dom0 kernel is not yet merged upstream, and this problem existed long long before Qumranet joined Red Hat. When we first shipped Xen in Fedora Core 5 (or was it 4?) none of the Xen code was merged into the mainline Linux kernel tree. For several releases we spent a great deal of time forward porting Xen to newer kernels. When we got to Fedora 9 the guest side was merged into the main kernel, but the host side was not. Unfortunately the Xen host kernel was still on 2.6.18 while Fedora was on 2.6.24 and the kernel was just too old to work with the userspace tools. We did not want to drop Xen Dom0 host from Fedora 9, but we had no viable options to continue with it in the short term. Since that time though, Jeremy Fitzhardinge has done alot of work on getting Dom0 patches in shape for merging in upstream Linux. It it still hard to say just when these will be accepted upstream, but there is a semi-reasonable we'll be able to turn Xen Dom0 back on in Fedora 11 kernels. While we (Red Hat) think KVM is a very compelling technology, as long as Xen is open source, actively maintained upstream & in mainline Linux kernels, there's no reason why it shouldn't be available in Fedora. So once the Dom0 kernel is merged, Fedora users will be able to have a choice between Xen and KVM for many future releases. We have also put effort into developing Xenner which allows paravirt Xen guests to be run under KVM without having to re-configure the guest kernel, giving people a potential migration strategy if they need one. As for RHEL-5, that continues to support Xen, and will do for the entire of its 7 year lifetime. If you don't want official Red Hat support, there is also the option of using CentOS 5 as a Xen host which again will have Xen support it in for whole of its 7 year lifetime. So while it is definitely unfortunate that we don't have a Xen Dom0 kernel in Fedora 9/10, we are *not* trying to shaft anyone & will re-introduce Xen Dom0 kernels to Fedora when they become available. Regards, Daniel -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :| -- Fedora-xen mailing list Fedora-xen@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-xen
