Re: [Xen-devel] Xen dom0 Kernel Patches

[Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik@xxxxxx>]

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.

Are you willing to maintain such patchsets? The temporary 2.6.27-xen tree made 
for
Novell/SuSE guys is totally unmaintained.. 

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.

-- Pasi

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel