F7 Plan (draft)

Jeremy Katz katzj at redhat.com
Wed Dec 20 21:13:00 UTC 2006


On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 16:04 -0500, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 December 2006 15:48, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > > So then why is Xen completely and utterly broken on rawhide, with no hope
> > > on the horizon?
> >
> > To be fair, this isn't because it's not being worked on -- it's just
> > that it's a huge chunk of work to get it back to working.  But Juan is
> > continuing to move forward and make progress
> 
> True.  However if we were waiting for Xen to work again, we'd be holding up 
> further kernel development, for something that the Fedora userbase at large 
> may not care about.  

There's a pretty large segment of the Fedora userbase that cares about
and is actively using Xen.  And pretty much the largest contingent of
Xen users are using it on Fedora.  Unfortunately, this is an area where
we've made commitments to users that we think it's important and I'm not
sure that we can just drop it on the cutting room floor.

> With KVM upstream, and lhype having far more of a chance 
> than Xen, how much does our userbase really care about Xen when there are 
> better (or at least more accepted) replacements?

If they actually were to a point where they provided equivalent
functionality, then it'd be something to talk about.  But right now,
they're just not there.  It's like saying that we should stop shipping
our current desktop environments for the one I started in my basement
last week ;-)

KVM is only _just_ upstream and isn't anywhere near as mature as Xen for
fully virt (and it is _only_ fully virt).  There's no support for SMP, a
lot of real mode stuff has no chance of working[1], no work has been
done on performance at all, the OS coverage is definitely less, there
isn't a framework for paravirt drivers, etc.  Also, our toolset
currently has zero support for it.  I expect that all of these will
improve over time, but it's just not a point where it's a drop-in
replacement for Xen's fully virt capabilities.

As for lhype, it's just as not upstream as Xen and yet isn't nearly as
mature in terms of having tools, OS integration, performance, SMP, etc.

Jeremy




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