Re: [Xen-users] Mercurial Quick Start Guide Featuring Xen?

[Tim Post <tim.post@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2007-03-12 at 05:05 +0000, Mark Williamson wrote:
> > > Why do you have to use 2.0.x for anything today?
> >
> > Existing paravirtualized Open SSI clusters that will break horribly
> > under Xen 3 and can not be removed. They have been up happily for quite
> > a while now.
> >
> > Fair question, however :)
> 
> That's unfortunate.  

I wouldn't go as far as to call it unfortunate. 2.0.7 was available,
stable and quite capable of filling a rather unique need. The only thing
undesirable about it is its age.

> If you had any HVM capable machines you could run those 
> domains using a native OpenSSI kernel instead of paravirt...

Still brings me back to hoping for help from Mercurial to get the
patches that we made that apply *only* to the stock parts of SSI to be
applied to the new kernels. 

Also still leaves me with the odd mix of other stuff. Part of the reason
for the mess is customizations got written into place and were made
version dependent. 

Mercurial (I think) can give me a birds eye view to straighten out the
whole mess once and for all. It is now bad, imagine another year worth
of new servers being racked and new versions of Xen. 

> Or possibly 
> just run Xen 2.0 in an HVM virtual machine (I'd imagine that'd work; I find 
> Xen 3 runs quite fine under HVM for development work - with a few quirks and 
> a bit of a slowdown).

Unfortunately these things are pretty I/O hungry. I tried both stock SSI
and 2.0.7 as a HVM on some socket AM2's. Both worked, neither worked
well enough that I'd consider putting traffic to them.

It wasn't just I/O, process migration got 'fickle' for lack of a better
word. I did not spend as much time on it as I wanted to. I think half of
the problem was things in ssi-debian (sarge) itself, not just the fact
that it was HVM.

I have not given up on getting a 2.6.16 xen-ssi PV kernel working, nor
given up on the idea that such a thing would use ocfs2 :) Its just hard
to get others interested in working on it, by the time one person can
finish it you'll be at xen 4.0 :|

> 
> Cheers,
> Mark
> 

Best,
--Tim


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