On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 8:35 PM, Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik@xxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 03, 2009 at 07:49:17PM +0100, Andrew Lyon wrote:
>> The recent discussions about pv_ops dom0 has left me in some doubt
>> about using Xen in a production environment, while various distros
>> forward port the Xen patches only openSUSE does so for very recent
>> kernels like 2.6.29, I regularly grab the kernel source rpm from them,
>> rebase the patches to apply to vanilla, and release a Gentoo ebuild
>> which quite a few people have used successfully, but I doubt I am
>> alone in wanting a official dom0 kernel that is not years old.
>>
>> My question is this, given that the openSUSE patches seem to work
>> quite well would it really be so much work to at least update the
>> Xensource kernel to 2.6.29 or .30? I believe openSUSE use a semi
>> automated process for forward porting but however they do it the
>> results are quite good, couldn't the Xen developers work with the
>> distro maintainers to keep the patches up to date? I understand that
>> each distro has its own set of additional kernel patches but if the
>> work was done on Vanilla then they could all apply the Xen patches
>> first and adjust their other patches as necessary.
>>
>> It seems to me that a huge amount of effort is being duplicated in the
>> forward porting when a combined effort is bound to produce better
>> results, if multiple distro's can find the resources to do it surely
>> working together with Xensource would be less effort for everybody.
>>
>> The openSUSE patches I have used are from the bleeding edge kernel
>> builds and 2.6.29 is no longer available, but my current patchset
>> applies to Vanilla 2.6.29 and can be downloaded from
>> http://gentoo-xen-kernel.googlecode.com/files/xen-patches-2.6.29-6.tar.bz2,
>> the Xensource maintainers could grab that as a starting point and help
>> to fix any bugs that remain.
>>
>
> Good work with the patches.
Its really nothing, I am by no means a experienced C programmer, I
just have enough knowledge to figure out how to fix the few rejected
hunks in the patches, and I've fixed a couple of small bugs where
datatypes were mismatched, but I've also had crash reports from users
which I was unable to help with :(, if a couple of more knowledgeable
people who could help with the tricky problems I think we could
maintain a decent standard of reliability.
>
> Are you willing to maintain such patchsets? The temporary 2.6.27-xen tree
> made for
> Novell/SuSE guys is totally unmaintained..
Depends what you mean by maintain, I'm willing to try to update the
2.6.29 patches as minor kernel versions are released, and with any
bugfixes that are commited to
http://xenbits.xensource.com/linux-2.6.18-xen.hg, and I think even the
current state of my 2.6.29 is better than the 2.6.27-xen tree, and
when 2.6.30 is released I will rebase the openSUSE patches again, what
makes it difficult is that I've no idea how openSUSE make the patches
in the first place, I am fairly sure it is not fully automated so
there may be a commits mailing list where I could learn more about
where the patches are derived from. They are bleeding edge kernels and
openSUSE soon abandon the stable release and switch to the latest
-git, so once a new stable kernel is released my source of updated
patches dries up.
The second issue is that sometimes I have very little free time, it
completely depends on my workload in my paying job ;).
>
> I think most of the development effort should be used on getting pv_ops dom0
> ready for
> mainline, but if you (for example), want to maintain forward-ported patches
> for new kernel versions, it sounds like a good idea.. for the time being.
I totally agree, but I've got a virtualization project which is
starting soon and I want to use Xen for it, but even if it runs
smoothly with my kernel I still worry about using a self maintained
kernel, the Xensource one lacks some hardware support which we
require, and none of the distro supported kernels are new enough.
Perhaps I should contact the people who forward port for other distros...
Andy
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