[Fedora-xen] Minimal Fedora 8 Xen Setup for Laptop

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 07:58:55AM -0800, Mathew Brown wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:33:13 +0000, "Richard W.M. Jones"
> <rjones at redhat.com> said:
> > Mathew Brown wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >   I was considering installing a minimal Fedora 8 setup with the Xen
> > >   kernel and then performing most of my work in several different DomUs
> > >   (perhaps Fedora of Ubuntu) as well as running Windows in a VMware
> > >   setup (don't currently have hardware virtualization support).  Note
> > >   that this is on a laptop.  Are there any specific issues that I should
> > >   be aware of (such as suspend/resume issues, etc.) and does anyone have
> > >   any specific recommendations?  Thank you for your help.
> > 
> > Xen and laptops aren't really friends with each other.  In particular 
> > power management doesn't work so the laptop will run hot and eat 
> > batteries, suspend/resume are unlikely to work, and so on.
> 
> I remember on the Xen mailing list that they wanted to encourage people
> to start using Xen on laptops to help troubleshoot power management
> related issues.

There's no troubleshooting to be done. It is quite simply not implemented.
There is no suspend/hibernate support. CPU scaling is useless because
Dom0 can't neccessarily see all physical CPUs, and has no info about the
activity of the guest.

The split Dom0/HV  architecture is a loosing battle for ths kind of stuff
which is why we recoomend KVM as the only viable solution for laptops.

Dan.
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