(OT) Re: 2.6.20 for FC6?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Feb 07, 2007 at 09:39:51AM +0100, dragoran wrote:
> Dave Jones wrote:
> >On Tue, Feb 06, 2007 at 03:08:04PM -0600, Gilbert Sebenste wrote:
> > > On Tue, 6 Feb 2007, Dave Jones wrote:
> > > 
> > > > It gets better...
> > > > http://www.devxnews.com/article.php/3658001
> > > >
> > > > "Pratt also explained that Xen is no longer actively seeking 
> > inclusion in the mainline Linux kernel either."
> > > Oh, swell. So a 2.6.20 kernel for FC5 is DOA. :-(
> >
> >Not really. The rebases over the last year or two have been done by
> >Red Hat, not Xensource.  By the time the 'official' Xen tree is
> >updated, it's based on some six month old kernel which is uninteresting.
> >So sit tight and wait for the Xen team to do their magic.
> >(Largely the work of Juan Quintela, who succeeds in doing in a month
> > what takes Xensource half a year to do)
> >
> I don't know how Juan handles this but wouldn't it be easier to port xen 
> during a kernel development cycle and not after the kernel is released? 
> If there are some last minute changes they wont be that big. I assume 
> that this will save a lot of time (if not already done).

Juan handles a hell of alot of work - its not merely tracking upstream
LKML, but also tracking upstream xen-devel. Doing this for i386, x86_64
and ia64, and many of the really nasty merge issues are low level hardware
stuff. Add to that Juan's maintaining upto 6 kernel trees - xen 3.0.3 
against 2.6.18, .19, .20, likewise for xen 3.0.4 - providing updates for 
3 Fedora releases FC5, FC6 and rawhide. At the same time we are continually
pushing upstream xen-devel to get onto recent kernels to make this work
easier, as well as having more folks working on paravirt_ops and a Xen
paravirt_ops impl as a 2nd strategy for getting a mainline Xen tree.

So yes, having Xen out of tree is incredibly painful for everyone concerned
and we are pursuing multiple angles to reduce this pain and hopefully get
to a state where Xen is in sync with LKML, and preferrably merged. Its a
large body of code so its not a quick or easy process :-(

Regards,
Dan.
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