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[Xen-devel] Re: Xen is a feature

To: David Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Xen-devel] Re: Xen is a feature
From: George Dunlap <george.dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 29 May 2009 13:01:18 +0100
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David Miller wrote:
I don't see Ingo's comments, whether I agree with them or not, as
an implication of Xen being niche.  Rather I see his comments as
an opposition to how Xen is implemented.
It's in his definition of "improving Linux". Jeremy is saying that allowing Linux to run as dom0 *is* improving Linux. The lack of dom0 support is at this moment making life more difficult for a huge number of Linux users who use Xen, including Mozilla, Debian, and Amazon. Adding dom0 support would make Linux even more useful to a wide variety of people not using Xen at the moment. Saying that dom0 support is "not about improving Linux" completely ignores the cost people are paying right now, and the benefits people could have. That (if I understand him) what Jeremy meant by saying it was treating it as if it was some kind of "niche usage, with barely more users than Voyager", and "being a pure drain".
I don't see any animosity at all in what Ingo has said.
The last few paragraphs of the e-mail weren't about that particular argument, but about the sum of the interaction with Ingo over dom0 support for the last 6 months. If you read the various threads, it's pretty clear that Ingo is resistant to accepting dom0 changes, for whatever reason, and has been looking for reasons not to include it. If we take him at his word, that the root issue is that he fundamentally dislikes the design choice of running Linux-as-hypervisor-component, then we have a difference of opinion and we're just going to have to agree to disagree. But there are reasons to include it anyway, including benefits to existing Xen users and potential Xen users (who have decided not to use KVM for whatever reason), and the idea of survival-of-the-fittest: Xen and KVM have made different design choices, let's let them both grow and see which one thrives. If KVM's design is unilaterally superior, eventually Xen will die off. But I suspect that there's significant demand in the OSS virtualization ecology for both approaches, and the world will be the worse for dom0 support being out-of-tree.

In any case, making unreasonable or inconsistent technical objections, when the root issue is is actually something else, is a waste of time and energy for everyone involved.

-George

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