Re: [Xen-devel] [FW: FYI: The plan for Xen kernels in Fedora 9]

["Stephen C. Tweedie" <sct@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On Mon, 2007-12-10 at 13:48 -0800, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:

> I'm actually optimistic we can beat them into an upstreamable state, at
> least eventually.  Devil's in the details, of course, but the
> pre-existing Xen foothold in the kernel and x86 unification should make
> it easier to add interfaces to allow the dom0 stuff to work, so long as
> we're careful and exercise good taste.

Right.  But getting something in shape soon to wean us all off the
2.6.18-xen tree is the priority right now.

As I pull stuff into the dom0 pv-ops tree, I'm being careful to try to
make things as maintainable as possible, and to do nothing that will
make upstreaming harder.  That means no magic *-xen.c copies of
mainstream files, etc.  

But there are definitely places where the right upstream answer isn't
obvious (eg, where mtrr meets pv_ops... both subsystems try to hide
their internals behind an abstraction layer, so we need to break the
abstractions somewhere to let pv_ops install an mtrr back-end.)  In such
cases I'm having to make a decision quickly as to how things will go in
just to get the tree progressing; but we'll have to go back and
potentially rework a lot of that before it's actually upstreamable.

So ... even if we do get everything upstream eventually, it will take a
while (look how long the existing pv_ops took.)  But making the code as
upstreamable as possible pays dividends even while things are still out
of Linus's tree, just by making things more maintainable.  And that's a
BIG bonus.

--Stephen





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