[Xen-API] Re: [Xen-devel] Building XCP Debian packages: what sources or repo to use?

[Jonathan Ludlam <Jonathan.Ludlam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Removing xen-devel, adding xen-api)

On 4 May 2011, at 09:05, Ian Campbell wrote:

On Tue, 2011-05-03 at 18:41 +0100, Thomas Goirand wrote:

----- Original message -----

On Mon, 2011-05-02 at 02:47 +0100, Todd Deshane wrote:

I think that being able to install an XCP system from package is a

long goal anyway, so getting a jump on it in Debian is a great idea.

I think so too, but it's worth highlighting that XCP on Debian is far

more than a standard .deb packaging exercise, I expect there will be

plenty of actual development effort required to actually make it work.

Like what? I don't get what is XCP if not few

more packages on top of Xen. Can you explain?

xapi is tightly integrated with the underlying (CentOS) distro, which
has also been modified to better aid this integration. Remember that it
was originally developed as a complete integrated solution.

One example that xapi's host networking configuration support currently
only speaks to (a modified version of) CentOS's ifcfg configuration
format.

Also some core parts of the OS are modified, for example LVM has been
patched with some XCP specific patches (I don't recall the details)
which are specific to the integration with the XCP storage manager
plugins.

I'm sure there are others.

A shortlist of modified packages: LVM, biosdevname, dm-multipath, e2fsprogs, ethtool, open-iscsi, kexec. There are more, but these are the more important ones.

The trouble is that XCP has been developed as an integrated system rather than an addon set of packages for an existing operating system. While it's not *far* off from being the latter, it would take quite a bit of effort both to figure out all the reason why each RPM has been patched, not to mention all the implicit dependencies that we have on the behaviour of the underlying OS. We'd then have to figure out on a case-by-case basis whether the patch was general enough to upstream, and if not, whether a workaround existed that avoids the need of the patch, and if not, we'd have to patch the debs.

I think it could be made to work without *too* much effort so long as you were willing to sacrifice some bits of functionality. I would guess that you could get an XCP system up and running on ubuntu within a couple of weeks or so, but it probably wouldn't be able to do LVM based storage backends, and I would guess a fair bit of the more advanced networking bits and pieces would require more effort.

Jon

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