Re: [Xen-users] Latest Xen Kernel

["Christopher Isip" <cmisip@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 6:07 AM, Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik@xxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:43:42AM +0200, Paul Schulze wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Hi Christopher,
>
> If you need some extended capabilities, the mainline kernel's Xen
> support won't be much help. That includes pci passthrough support
> (don't know when this'll ever be part of vanilla), but as long as you
> find the necessary patches, any kernel should work. I've found Xen
> patches for kernel 2.6.25 in the debian linux-image source package
> for example (though I haven't tried them yet, because it's a whole
> lot of work to extract the ones that are necessary) and for my IPCop
> Experimental DomU I'm using the Xen and IO delay patches from
> Ubuntu's linux-image-2.6.24-18-xen source package (this one still has
> some issues with pci_dma_xen-32.c and random crashes, but works in
> general) and I'm guessing there will be some patches for 2.6.26 in
> one distribution or another soon too. You'll need a bit of knowledge
> about how to extract the necessary stuff from those, about patching
> and building the kernel and probably about fixing some stuff by hand
> too (the Ubuntu 2.6.24 patches have issues with building a DomU-only
> kernel for example). You could always extract a precompiled kernel
> from a binary package though, but that might lead to problems with
> the system later (if some patch is missing for example).
>

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Linux 2.6.24 kernel contains "forward-port" of the xensource
2.6.18 xen patches, with full xen functionality.

Debian 2.6.25 Linux kernel contains the "native" pv_ops based xen support,
which is included in the upstream/vanilla kernel.org linux kernels.

pv_ops based Linux xen kernel lacks many of the features from xensource
xen kernels unfortunately.. at the moment. Linux 2.6.26 adds more features,
and more are queue for inclusion in 2.6.27. The biggest (most important) missing
feature from pv_ops kernels is dom0 support.

More info about pv_ops xen kernels:
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps

-- Pasi

> Cheers,
>
>
> Paul.
>
> - --
> Paul Schulze
> avlex@xxxxxxx
> Public Key: http://solaris-net.dyndns.org/keys/key_avlex.asc
>
> "Making mistakes is human,
> but to really fuck things up you need Computers"
>
>
> Am 17.07.2008 um 06:10 schrieb Tim Post:
>
> >On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 23:02 -0400, Christopher Isip wrote:
> >>What is the latest xen kernel that could be used in a domU?  I am
> >>currently using Ubuntu 8.04 with 2.6.24-16.
> >
> >That kernel can be used in a dom-u , however your going to need an
> >initrd since ext3 / ext2 are modular in that kernel.
> >
> >Any recent Linux kernel can be used as a dom-u kernel, this link
> >should
> >help you:
> >
> >http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/Kernel.org_Linux_on_Xen
> >
> >
> >Hope this helps.
> >
> >--Tim
> >
> >
> >

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Thanks for the replies.  I am interested mainly in forward ports as the paravirt-ops in mainline dont have pciback capability.  So, 2.6.25 will be paravirt-ops only?  To create a xenlinux kernel, I must manually patch 2.6.25 with the xen patches in debian linux source? 

Thanks
Chris

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