On Wed, 2010-01-27 at 22:11 +0000, Yann Hamon wrote: > > Thanks for the pointer, Lucas. > > > > I have worked with Yann to get a better KVM onto Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, more > > or less at his request. At the time, I backported the then-current > > kvm-84 from Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy), as a stop-gap > > measure, replacing the purely ancient kvm-62. Last I heard from Yann, > > kvm-84 (and friends) was working much better than kvm-62. > > Hello Dustin, thanks for replying here, and thank you again for the > backports. The backports indeed fixes major problems that I was having > with kvm62 - however I am experiencing regular crashes and haven't > been able to figure out why, til now. This didn't occured during my > testing phase, and even now occur fairly rarely (one same VM would > crash every month or so) - but becomes an issue as you get more vms. Right, per our former conversations, kvm-84 seemed significantly better. I'm sorry that it's still not totally stable. > > Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) has qemu-kvm-0.11, which seems more stable than > > kvm-84, in my experience. And the under-development Ubuntu 10.04 LTS > > (Lucid) currently has qemu-kvm-0.12.2. > > > > Once Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid) ships in April (or, if I get some down > > time between now and then), I will attempt to backport > > qemu-kvm-0.12.2 to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy). > > I think it's more me who assumed I would have a more stable KVM if I > sticked to LTS - KVM being relatively new, I might have been better > off upgrading every 6 months. Am readying my hosts for 10.4 as I > speak... Right, so KVM in particular is a bit of a special case, in that it's evolving so much faster than traditional server projects (take something like postfix, bind, or ssh). For most server workloads, I would generally point you at an Ubuntu LTS for optimum stability. Unfortunately, KVM was barely 1 year old when Ubuntu 8.04 released in April of 2008, and has stabilized tremendously in the last 2 years. Specifically if your key workload is KVM virtual machine hosting, I would actually recommending upgrading through the non-LTS Ubuntu releases. All that said, I think the KVM (linux-2.6.32 + qemu-kvm-0.12.2) story on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is going to be very different than KVM (linux-2.6.24 + kvm-62) story was on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Stability is absolutely Ubuntu's focus for the 10.04 release. And I gather from the upstream KVM and QEMU developers that releases of KVM in linux 2.6.32 and qemu-kvm 0.12.2 are far more stable as well. > > There's more than a few complications with doing this backport, and > > it > > takes considerable effort to do so, as there are several pieces that > > must be handled, and thoroughly tested, including at least: > > a) the modern kvm kernel module, and getting it building under DKMS > > b) the modern qemu-kvm userspace, getting it building against the > > older toolchain > > c) the modern libvirt library, getting it building against the older > > toolchain > > d) testing the interoperability of all of the above > > Indeed. Are you aware of any other production deployment using 8.04 > experiencing issues? If not, maybe it's just not worth it. There were definitely other people who were able to confirm some of the issues you raised with Hardy's kvm-62. All of those (that I know of) were pleased with the backported kvm-84, for those particular issues, at least. > > My efforts are currently 110% committed against developing Ubuntu > > 10.04 LTS (Lucid), and the virtualization stack there. Yann, and > > anyone wanting a backported virtualization stack against Ubuntu 8.04 > > LTS should follow the procedures at: > > * https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports > > and ideally someone from the Ubuntu community with backport > > experience > > can help get a new version building and tested. If there's someone > > volunteering to help with that work, I'll gladly mentor them and > > guide > > the process, sign, and upload packages to the Ubuntu repositories on > > their behalf. > > Oh my KVM hosts don't do much more than KVM, so I'd be fine with any > version of Ubuntu, really. Will probably move my dev vms to lucid > alpha, and test for a few months - and migrate everything to there > after release. I think this would be a very wise approach! Move one or two physical systems over to Lucid Alpha3 when it releases next week. File bugs you find against Lucid Alpha3 and we'll work through those issues, and upload fixes with great fervor and a much quicker turn-around. > From there I might do the 6 months upgrade. > Just thought that if the bug I am having was known and fixed I might > get a quick workaround which would have helped me wait :) Once Ubuntu 10.04 LTS releases, if all of your blocking bugs are fixed, then I'd stick with that until the next LTS (12.04-ish). Basically, I'd only upgrade if there's something in particular that I know is broken in one release, and is fixed in the next. :-Dustin
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