Re: [Xen-devel] state of xenified SUSE kernel

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

>>> On 18.05.16 at 16:39, <ml-ak@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 17.05.2016 17:34, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>> We use xenified kernels based on kernel 3.4 for years and benchmarks
>>> showed that they are faster than the pvops (vanilla) kernels.
>>> But what is the current state in terms of performance and features?
>> I'm not sure what you expect here. Up to openSUSE 42.1 and
>> SLE 12 SP1 they are fully maintained, i.e. you can get quite a
>> bit newer than 3.4 based kernels. There's not a lot of
>> performance analysis that I would be aware of, so I can't
>> answer that part anyway. And them being release branches
>> rather than development ones, there's not going to be any
>> new feature work.
> 
> As far as I know the patches are based on the original work for kernel 
> 2.6.18 and have not been adjusted to major changes in Xen architecture. 
> So what I am thinking about is performance improvements that result from 
> using newer Xen features.

We've added support for newer features where suitable, over the
years. When reasonable I've also tried to put these into the 2.6.18
tree. But from all I can tell right now this isn't going to happen any
further.

> So the question was: from an architectural 
> point of view should pvops in recent vanilla kernels be "better" then 
> xenified kernels?

Hence it's hard to answer this question, the more that I can't even
prove (or disprove) what you've said regarding its performance
having been better in the past.

Jan


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