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Mot clé - xen

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vendredi, août 11 2006

Novell and RedHat fighting about Xen

Par jd le vendredi, août 11 2006, 15:37 - Xen

Some days ago, RedHat claims that Xen is not ready yet for production environment. Now, Novell strikes back and defend their inclusion of Xen in their latest SUSE release.

That's so funny, because in fact they don't give any concret argument. RedHat says that it's not mature, and Novell just answers that they've contributed to the code.

As a member of the Debian Xen team, I'll arbitrate between us.

Xen is nowadays deployed in a lot of solution and in a lot of system architecture. I don't think this is because the Xen technology is mature, but only because it's the solution which fit the best the need of virtualization (and cost rationalisation) that organizations may have.

Xen can not pretend to be stable, mature, or whatever you want, because it is still not integrated into the Linux kernel tree, and thus far for a good reason: the API/ABI is not yet stable.
I know that in theory it is, but in fact it's quite wrong and you cannot rely on that specification. Xen works fine but from a developer point of view it is not in a stable and fixed shape.

It seems that Linus and others kernel people are not very happy to integrate directly Xen into the mainline kernel, and I can understand them, since this technology is rather new. I don't think Xen will be a suitable solution which can be deployed for years until Linus decide to integrate a virtualization system into the Linux kernel.

Furthermore, Xen is still a huge source tarball of mess with a big kernel patch.

And even if I really think that Xen will be the adopted solution for everyone, it won't be in its current state.

So, I think RedHat is pretty right. Just think about the Xgl/AIGLX stuff, that's quite again the same behavior between this two companies.

4 commentaires

mercredi, mai 17 2006

Xen backports

Par jd le mercredi, mai 17 2006, 08:10 - Xen

Guido's backports of Xen 3 Debian packages just entered backports.org repository.

mercredi, mai 10 2006

Debian Xen howto up to date

Par jd le mercredi, mai 10 2006, 17:54 - Xen

I just upgraded my Xen installation at home this week-end, so I updated my Xen Debian howto. Now it is up to date, and it's here. It covers Xen installation for both Sarge and Etch.

jeudi, avril 27 2006

Announcing #debian-xen

Par jd le jeudi, avril 27 2006, 15:45 - Debian

Oh, by the way, there's a #debian-xen channel on OFTC for people interested.

lundi, avril 24 2006

Xen.. ACCEPTED

Par jd le lundi, avril 24 2006, 17:43 - Debian

Xen 3 will be entering sid tomorrow... bewaaaaare...

Thanks nice ftp-masters.

3 commentaires

mardi, avril 11 2006

Status of Xen in Debian

Par jd le mardi, avril 11 2006, 22:26 - Debian

As you may have read it in the latest DWN, Xen is now (almost) supported by Debian. Actually, it is currently stucked in the NEW queue since yesterday. The packages are also available on our Alioth webspace.
Special flavor of glibc, libc6-xen, is also upcoming, thanks to Aurelien Jarno !

Err, what else to say ?
That the Xen upstream sources are not very clean for now. There's still a lot of tools not needed that are furnished, the sources are a mess, and there is no stable API for now. You may have seen Xen kernels in experimental, but the kernel team has removed them for now. It will probably not be possible to distribute Xen-enabled kernels as long as Xen won't be more stabilized. I really wish that it will be integrated in kernel vanilla sources, since this could calm down a bit big changes, and help having a more stable version.

Just see that between 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 version, the way used to compile Xen kernels changed from a special arch xen to a subarch xen. That's better, for sure, but such important changes in the same major branch are quite disappointing.

Finally, I would say that Xen is now usable with Debian. I use it for more than 6 months now, and it is quite stable, no huge bug. You will just have to wait that #346387 is fixed to compile your own kernels with patches we provide.

un commentaire

lundi, avril 3 2006

Xen howto update

Par jd le lundi, avril 3 2006, 16:06 - Xen

I just updated my Xen 3 for Debian howto, because it was still talking about Xen 2.

Now it relies on official Debian packages.

un commentaire

mardi, mars 7 2006

Fern world domination

Par jd le mardi, mars 7 2006, 10:54 - Debian

Pkg-xen-changes r79 - branches

Author: ultrotter
Date: 2006-03-07 09:45:36 +0000 (Tue, 07 Mar 2006)
New Revision: 79
Added:
  branches/20060307-fern/
Branch the latest compiling revision (r71) to a new area...
The name was proposed by Julien, who pointed us to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fern
I'm still a bit unsure about how it's xen related, but it sounded cool! ;)

You don't know but that the beginning of the world domination of ferns ! AHAHAHA ! ;)

lundi, février 27 2006

About Xen in Debian

Par jd le lundi, février 27 2006, 21:32 - Debian

Some people may have noticed that a thread has recently started about Xen on debian-devel.

To sum up the whole story, here it is.

Guido Trotter and myself asked Adam Heath, the current official maintainer of Xen, if it was possible to help him (bug #342249) to package Xen 3.
He did not answer to our messages, as he seems to be MIA, so we started with Jeremy Bouse, Ralph Passgang and Yvette Chanco to work and we created a project on Alioth in order to package the latest release. We started our development from the package Ralph made previously.

We don't know really why, but Bastian Blank, from the Debian kernel team, uploaded his own package of Xen 3, ignoring our request to work on our side, arguing that this was the work of kernel team to maintain Xen. It seems that actually, the kernel team only pretend to maintain the Dom0 and DomU kernel images, probably as soon as Xen in included in the vanilla kernel, and that Bastian took the decision alone to maintain the hypervizor and userspace tools.

Today, we have functionnal and splitted packages of Xen 3, available on the Subversion repository.

I made Xen packages with the latest development version of our packages and the Xen testing version. They are available from:

deb http://naquadah.org/~jd/debian/xen stable main

Official backports will be uploaded to backports.org as soon as we will have uploaded a version to sid. But for now, we have to cancel or bypass the upload Bastian made...

un commentaire

dimanche, février 26 2006

Xen 3

Par jd le dimanche, février 26 2006, 00:32 - Naquadah Network

Finally, I managed to switch to Xen 3 on a box!

My hardware problems with Ethernet devices was solved by adding acpi=off to the Xen hypervizor boot parameters, and turning off tx checksumming (ethtool -K eth0 tx off).

jeudi, février 16 2006

xend stop crashing

Par jd le jeudi, février 16 2006, 10:55 - Free Software

Howto make xend stop crashing ?

% xm sysrq mydomU 0

No more logging on console... no more xend eating 99% CPU time.

jeudi, février 9 2006

Upgrading to Xen 3... aborted :(

Par jd le jeudi, février 9 2006, 22:00 - Naquadah Network

It seems that after two hours stuck in front of my minicom, trying to upgrade my server/gateway from Xen 2 to Xen 3, Sarge version of udev and hotplug are too old. I will have to try with a backport tomorrow... What a pity...

4 commentaires

mardi, novembre 1 2005

About RedHat and Xen inclusion in the Linux kernel

Par jd le mardi, novembre 1 2005, 14:46 - Free Software

Yeah, according to eWeek, RedHat wants Xen to be part of the Linux kernel.

My point of view, if anybody cares, is that it's a good point for us. Virtualization (or supervision, call it as you want to) is a new battle coming in our little world.
Why? Because it's the new easy way to secure and handle big and/or complex information system infrastructure and architecture in a cheaper way. No more need of many boxes dedicated to one job, just a few, and run as many as you want different OS and isolate them. The second argument is the possibility to manage workload flows, migrate then, freeze them and so on, in a transparent way. That's why virtualization is great and powerful in some way and because you will love it.

Yeah, I confess, I love Xen, because it works.

And finally, we don't want Microsoft to have this argument on its side only. ;-)

mercredi, août 17 2005

NetBSD/Xen unstable :(

Par jd le mercredi, août 17 2005, 16:31 - Xen

While compiling lftp:

uvm_swapin: rewiring stack failed: 5                              
Stopped in pid 0.1 (swapper) at netbsd:cpu_Debugger+0x4:        leave           
cpu_Debugger(c389c6b4,0,c033af48,c389c6b4,c389c6b4) at netbsd:cpu_Debugger+0x4  
panic(c029d1e0,5,c033af68,c0234023,c389c6b4) at netbsd:panic+0x11d              
uvm_scheduler(c389c6b4,c02800cd,c033af68,c0233f56,0) at netbsd:uvm_scheduler    
uvm_scheduler(c02e73a0,0,c02eb73c,c027de96,1) at netbsd:uvm_scheduler+0xcf      
main(0,0,0,0,0) at netbsd:main+0x68f                                            
ds          0x11                                                                
es          0x11                                                                
fs          0x31                                                                
gs          0x11                                                                
edi         0x1                                                                 
esi         0x100                                                               
ebp         0xc033af08  xbd_allxr+0x4c268                                       
ebx         0xc033af34  xbd_allxr+0x4c294                                       
edx         0                                                                   
ecx         0                                                                   
eax         0x61e                                                               
eip         0xc0244d00  cpu_Debugger+0x4                                        
cs          0x9                                                                 
eflags      0x202                                                               
esp         0xc033af08  xbd_allxr+0x4c268                                
ss          0x11                                                                
netbsd:cpu_Debugger+0x4:        leave                                           
Stopped in pid 0.1 (swapper) at netbsd:cpu_Debugger+0x4:        leave

The same thing happened if I use my xennet devices heavily... :(

2 commentaires

lundi, août 15 2005

Xen tutorial

Par jd le lundi, août 15 2005, 18:12 - Free Software

Xen logo
I just finished my Xen tutorial.

I wrote it very quickly, and I am waiting for some feedback in order to enhance it a little.

13 commentaires un rétrolien

vendredi, août 12 2005

My new server

Par jd le vendredi, août 12 2005, 12:14 - Naquadah Network

After 2 years of services, my main server hosted by Lost Oasis, called Netu, is now... Delmak!
That's the same machine, but it is now running Xen (see my last entry about how Xen is fantastic and can improve your sexual performance).

Delmak is the dom0 and Netu is a domU. Netu is now managing FTP and shell access to my users, and services like mail, http, etc, will be migrated to Delmak.

Why Delmak? Delmak is a planet and Netu is its moon. Can you feel the Xen spirit? ;-)

dimanche, août 7 2005

xen rocks

Par jd le dimanche, août 7 2005, 16:46 - Xen

I decided that I had enough of having plenty of computers running at home to run a gateway, a workstation, a server, a dev(a)station, etc...

I gave a try to some virtualizations things like vserver. This one does not do what I want, because it's only a kernel patched with a context support.
This is like a powerful chroot() system, but for examples, this is not very good for doing routing stuff, because you have only one kernel and all IP adresses are bound to your real interfaces.

So I tried Xen, and it is very very nice. I can run as many computers (and so, kernel) as I want and they act like real computers, not a computer with chrooted services (like vserver). You can also put your virtual node on the CPU you want, distribute your RAM as you want and emulate the number of NIC you want to. I like that.
Network access between kernel are made using Ethernet bridges, which is very nicer than the vserver method.

You can also run NetBSD hosts in your XenLinux host. I think I will give it a try too, probably to emulate my gateway.

This is more powerful than UML too.

In consequence, I plan to replace my current 3 machines with a big one (2.4 GHz/1 GB RAM), emulating 3 nodes: a gateway/firewall, a developpement station and a server for my local services.

6 commentaires