Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Bastian Blank]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 10:25:14PM +0100, Matthias Klose wrote:
> I did speak with Christian Motschke, who did test the package. I'll look 
> at the package this weekend, and sponsor it if nobody else did sponsor it 
> until then.

Please don't. He did not come back to the Xen team after the discussion.
There are too many questions open.

Bastian

-- 
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-- Edith Keeler, "The City on the Edge of Forever",
   stardate unknown


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Bastian Blank]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 03:22:16AM +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> It's been 3 months that I am searching for a sponsor for this one:

Well, the mails don't looked like you wanted that.

> http://ftparchive.gplhost.com/debian/pool/lenny/main/x/xen-qemu-dm-3.4/xen-qemu-dm-3.4_3.4.2-1.dsc
> Which is tested and working.

Please explain the differences to my packages described in
20091216212224.ga22...@wavehammer.waldi.eu.org>.

Bastian

-- 
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-- Miramanee, Kirk's wife, "The Paradise Syndrome",
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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Matthias Klose]

On 24.03.2010 20:22, Thomas Goirand wrote:


- Original message -

Ben Hutchings wrote:

Xen might be doing well in some distributions but in lenny it has been a
disaster.  We have been stuck with a dead-end branch that no-one has the
time and knowledge to fix.  I believe squeeze will be better due to the
common base kernel version and some support from upstream Xen developers
(particularly Ian Campbell), but it will still lack the wide support
that KVM gets as a project that has been merged into the kernel.


I've just noticed that HVM guests (such as Windows) are broken in Xen in
squeeze due to the lack of qemu-dm (see #562703).  Any word on plans for
that?


There's more than plan, there's the solution.

It's been 3 months that I am searching for a sponsor for this one:

http://ftparchive.gplhost.com/debian/pool/lenny/main/x/xen-qemu-dm-3.4/xen-qemu-dm-3.4_3.4.2-1.dsc

Which is tested and working.

If anyone cared sponsoring the 1st upload that'd be great. I have a good hope 
to be DM allowed soon as my AM already approved it.

I have Ian Jackson and the person responsible for Qemu in Xen (both from 
Citrix) that promissed to help, especially in case of a security issue on the 
package.


I did speak with Christian Motschke, who did test the package. I'll look at the 
package this weekend, and sponsor it if nobody else did sponsor it until then.


  Matthias


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Ian Campbell]

On Wed, 2010-03-24 at 23:05 +0300, William Pitcock wrote: 
> Hello,
> 
> - "Ian Campbell"  wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 2010-02-26 at 11:29 +0100, Olivier Bonvalet wrote:
> > > 
> > > But xen-tools have be removed from Squeeze, so I suppose it will be
> > > more difficult to create new installations (require much more work
> > to
> > > replace the xen-create-image script). 
> > 
> > Squeeze (32- and 64-bit) and Lenny (32-bit only) both support
> > installation into a Xen domU using the regular Debian Installer,
> > including preseeding etc. Instructions for use can be seen at
> > . Squeeze even supports
> > installation from ISOs into a Xen domU (using the multiarch
> > amd64+i386
> > +powerpc netinst ISO). 
> > 
> > Is there any way this functionality could be exposed via xen-tools to
> > make it easier to deploy? (I don't know if/how it would fit into the
> > xen-tools model).
> 
> xen-tools is similar to ApplianceKit, in that it invokes the same lowlevel
> tools that debian-installer uses to install the guest OS instead of using d-i
> directly.

By "lowlevel tools" you mean debootstrap or something else? d-i does
much more than just the debootstrap phase.

> However, xen-tools is more limited than ApplianceKit in the regard that
> ApplianceKit has functionality somewhat like preseeding.

I'd not heard of ApplianceKit -- I'll check it out, thanks. 

Hmm, looks like http://appliancekit.systeminplace.net/ (referenced from
your ITP) is gone ("To change this page, upload your website into the
public_html directory") and www.appliancekit.org (google's result) seems
to have expired.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Campbell

You mean you don't want to watch WRESTLING from ATLANTA?


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[William Pitcock]

- "Ben Hutchings"  wrote:

> On Wed, 2010-03-24 at 17:58 +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> > > But xen-tools have be removed from Squeeze, so I suppose it will
> be more difficult to create new
> > > installations (require much more work to replace the
> xen-create-image script).
> > 
> > Well, I've been maintaining dtc-xen since Lenny, and it does even
> more than xen-tools.
> > 
> > DTC-Xen is in Squeeze and I wont give-up on it.
> > 
> > > > 6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way?  What
> can I do
> > > > to help with this point?
> > > Remind people that Xen is dying and KVM is the present and the
> future.
> > 
> > This is your own *personal view* on Xen vs KVM thing. I really
> don't
> > see Xen dying despite the 2 years of bad propaganda of the KVM
> > supporters. This eroneous view should *NOT* be pushed as Debian's
> > official view. Xen is doing well, and there are more chances that
> the
> > dom0 patches will be accepted this year as people improve Xen as
> > required for inclusion.
> [...]
> 
> Xen might be doing well in some distributions but in lenny it has been
> a
> disaster.  We have been stuck with a dead-end branch that no-one has
> the
> time and knowledge to fix.  I believe squeeze will be better due to
> the
> common base kernel version and some support from upstream Xen
> developers
> (particularly Ian Campbell), but it will still lack the wide support
> that KVM gets as a project that has been merged into the kernel.

However, the 2.6.26 kernel runs more reliably than the 2.6.18 kernels
provided by Citrix on my hardware, even though it has some weird bugs
which are probably not very feasible to fix (but those bugs have
workarounds).

I do agree that squeeze will be a considerable improvement over lenny,
though.  The main thing is that the hypervisor ABI requirement needs to
be strongly enforced so that the damned thing will boot.

William


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[William Pitcock]

Hello,

- "Ian Campbell"  wrote:

> On Fri, 2010-02-26 at 11:29 +0100, Olivier Bonvalet wrote:
> > 
> > But xen-tools have be removed from Squeeze, so I suppose it will be
> > more difficult to create new installations (require much more work
> to
> > replace the xen-create-image script). 
> 
> Squeeze (32- and 64-bit) and Lenny (32-bit only) both support
> installation into a Xen domU using the regular Debian Installer,
> including preseeding etc. Instructions for use can be seen at
> . Squeeze even supports
> installation from ISOs into a Xen domU (using the multiarch
> amd64+i386
> +powerpc netinst ISO). 
> 
> Is there any way this functionality could be exposed via xen-tools to
> make it easier to deploy? (I don't know if/how it would fit into the
> xen-tools model).

xen-tools is similar to ApplianceKit, in that it invokes the same lowlevel
tools that debian-installer uses to install the guest OS instead of using d-i
directly.

However, xen-tools is more limited than ApplianceKit in the regard that
ApplianceKit has functionality somewhat like preseeding.

I don't know about DTC-Xen, I've never tried it, but I suspect it probably
works the same way as the above, or uses tarballs which is *ugh*.

William


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Ian Campbell]

On Wed, 2010-03-24 at 20:18 +, Ian Campbell wrote:

> Hmm, looks like http://appliancekit.systeminplace.net/ (referenced from
> your ITP) is gone ("To change this page, upload your website into the
> public_html directory")

which I would have realised was a known issue if I'd read the ITP a bit
further.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Campbell

"It was a virgin forest, a place where the Hand of Man had never set foot."


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[William Pitcock]

Hi,

- "Thomas Goirand"  wrote:

> > But xen-tools have be removed from Squeeze, so I suppose it will be
> more difficult to create new
> > installations (require much more work to replace the
> xen-create-image script).
> 
> Well, I've been maintaining dtc-xen since Lenny, and it does even more
> than xen-tools.
> 
> DTC-Xen is in Squeeze and I wont give-up on it.

Not to mention that there is appliancekit, but it hasn't been uploaded into
Debian proper yet.  Both DTC-Xen and ApplianceKit are commercially-motivated
solutions, so there is no reason for them to disappear any time soon.

The main thing which has stopped getting AK uploaded into proper Debian is
that other dependencies need to be uploaded in order to get full feature
coverage and target support...

> 
> > > 6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way?  What
> can I do
> > > to help with this point?
> > Remind people that Xen is dying and KVM is the present and the
> future.
> 
> This is your own *personal view* on Xen vs KVM thing. I really don't
> see Xen dying despite the 2 years of bad propaganda of the KVM
> supporters. This eroneous view should *NOT* be pushed as Debian's
> official view. Xen is doing well, and there are more chances that the
> dom0 patches will be accepted this year as people improve Xen as
> required for inclusion.
> 
> Xen support in Debian will continue as long as there are some people
> willing to work on it, and there's quite some activity by the pkg-xen
> guys (Bastian, etc.).

Agreed.

William


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Thomas Goirand]

- Original message -
> Ben Hutchings wrote:
> > Xen might be doing well in some distributions but in lenny it has been a
> > disaster.  We have been stuck with a dead-end branch that no-one has the
> > time and knowledge to fix.  I believe squeeze will be better due to the
> > common base kernel version and some support from upstream Xen developers
> > (particularly Ian Campbell), but it will still lack the wide support
> > that KVM gets as a project that has been merged into the kernel.
>
> I've just noticed that HVM guests (such as Windows) are broken in Xen in
> squeeze due to the lack of qemu-dm (see #562703).  Any word on plans for
> that?

There's more than plan, there's the solution.

It's been 3 months that I am searching for a sponsor for this one:

http://ftparchive.gplhost.com/debian/pool/lenny/main/x/xen-qemu-dm-3.4/xen-qemu-dm-3.4_3.4.2-1.dsc

Which is tested and working.

If anyone cared sponsoring the 1st upload that'd be great. I have a good hope 
to be DM allowed soon as my AM already approved it.

I have Ian Jackson and the person responsible for Qemu in Xen (both from 
Citrix) that promissed to help, especially in case of a security issue on the 
package.

Thomas (from my mobile)


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Samuel Thibault]

John Goerzen, le Wed 24 Mar 2010 09:19:24 -0500, a écrit :
> I've just noticed that HVM guests (such as Windows) are broken in Xen in
> squeeze due to the lack of qemu-dm (see #562703).  Any word on plans for
> that?

Finding somebody that has the time to mentor an upload for Thomas
Goirand, see

http://ftparchive.gplhost.com/debian/pool/lenny/main/x/xen-qemu-dm-3.4/xen-qemu-dm-3.4_3.4.2-1.dsc

Samuel


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[John Goerzen]

Ben Hutchings wrote:
> Xen might be doing well in some distributions but in lenny it has been a
> disaster.  We have been stuck with a dead-end branch that no-one has the
> time and knowledge to fix.  I believe squeeze will be better due to the
> common base kernel version and some support from upstream Xen developers
> (particularly Ian Campbell), but it will still lack the wide support
> that KVM gets as a project that has been merged into the kernel.

I've just noticed that HVM guests (such as Windows) are broken in Xen in
squeeze due to the lack of qemu-dm (see #562703).  Any word on plans for
that?

> 
> Ben.
> 


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Ben Hutchings]

On Wed, 2010-03-24 at 17:58 +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> > But xen-tools have be removed from Squeeze, so I suppose it will be more 
> > difficult to create new
> > installations (require much more work to replace the xen-create-image 
> > script).
> 
> Well, I've been maintaining dtc-xen since Lenny, and it does even more than 
> xen-tools.
> 
> DTC-Xen is in Squeeze and I wont give-up on it.
> 
> > > 6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way?  What can I do
> > > to help with this point?
> > Remind people that Xen is dying and KVM is the present and the future.
> 
> This is your own *personal view* on Xen vs KVM thing. I really don't
> see Xen dying despite the 2 years of bad propaganda of the KVM
> supporters. This eroneous view should *NOT* be pushed as Debian's
> official view. Xen is doing well, and there are more chances that the
> dom0 patches will be accepted this year as people improve Xen as
> required for inclusion.
[...]

Xen might be doing well in some distributions but in lenny it has been a
disaster.  We have been stuck with a dead-end branch that no-one has the
time and knowledge to fix.  I believe squeeze will be better due to the
common base kernel version and some support from upstream Xen developers
(particularly Ian Campbell), but it will still lack the wide support
that KVM gets as a project that has been merged into the kernel.

Ben.

-- 
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I haven't lost my mind; it's backed up on tape somewhere.


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Thomas Goirand]

> But xen-tools have be removed from Squeeze, so I suppose it will be more 
> difficult to create new
> installations (require much more work to replace the xen-create-image script).

Well, I've been maintaining dtc-xen since Lenny, and it does even more than 
xen-tools.

DTC-Xen is in Squeeze and I wont give-up on it.

> > 6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way?  What can I do
> > to help with this point?
> Remind people that Xen is dying and KVM is the present and the future.

This is your own *personal view* on Xen vs KVM thing. I really don't see Xen 
dying despite the 2 years of bad propaganda of the KVM supporters. This 
eroneous view should *NOT* be pushed as Debian's official view. Xen is doing 
well, and there are more chances that the dom0 patches will be accepted this 
year as people improve Xen as required for inclusion.

Xen support in Debian will continue as long as there are some people willing to 
work on it, and there's quite some activity by the pkg-xen guys (Bastian, etc.).

Thomas


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Michael Tokarev]

Toni Mueller wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 27.02.2010 at 21:59:39 +0100, Tollef Fog Heen  wrote:
>> ]] Faidon Liambotis 
>> | Beyond that, I've also seen filesystem corruption when using live
>> | migration and the filesystem cache hasn't been disabled -- an almost
>> | undocumented directive of libvirt's XML.
>> | 
>> | All in all, I'm wondering how people can call this "stable".
>>
>> I would guess at most people not using live migration and so never
>> hitting those kinds of problems.
> 
> I have not used live migration, either, but unless Michael Tokarev's
> efforts turn out to be fruitful, I'll be out of KVM due to much bigger
> problems than a non-working live migration, and at that point, Xen
> would be the only alternative.

Toni, please understand that it looks like you're the only one on this
planet to hit the issues you describe with kvm.  #569990 and #568293 -
both of them are, well, unreproduceable (I mean the last parts of them).
Seriously, it was quite some time ago when I saw kvm behaving like this
having issues in places where it just works since long time...

I can't do anything with this unless I can reproduce the issues.  Or
maybe you provide access to your system to me.  Or else I'll just mark
the bugs as 'unreproduceable'.

I'm not a developer of qemu or kvm, I don't know much internals, but
I've some pretty good experience in this area (I think I've hit every
kvm's bug ever existed, -- that's why I wished to step in to manage it
in Debian), and I've seen many various problematic situations with it
too -- #kvm @FREENODE had alot of them.

What you describe just does not fit in my mind.  That's the reason of
my quite harsh tone when I replied to bugs mentioned above...  It's
sorta like discovering bugs in cat(1) (lockups, opening wrong files
etc) which worked for many people before...

Please don't get me wrong - I want this mess to be sorted out somehow,
but - in short - I can't believe it unless I'll see it with my own
eyes... ;)

By the way, have you tried to update BIOS and upgrade the CPU you
have?  If memory serves me right, you've Athlon X2 64 4400+, and
maybe that's the problematic one too...  I'll try kvm on my old
Acer Aspice 9300 (circa 2005 or so) with a dual-core Duron, but
I know I've run KVM on it before and it worked just fine...

Thanks!

/mjt


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Toni Mueller]

On Sat, 27.02.2010 at 21:59:39 +0100, Tollef Fog Heen  wrote:
> ]] Faidon Liambotis 
> | Beyond that, I've also seen filesystem corruption when using live
> | migration and the filesystem cache hasn't been disabled -- an almost
> | undocumented directive of libvirt's XML.
> | 
> | All in all, I'm wondering how people can call this "stable".
> 
> I would guess at most people not using live migration and so never
> hitting those kinds of problems.

I have not used live migration, either, but unless Michael Tokarev's
efforts turn out to be fruitful, I'll be out of KVM due to much bigger
problems than a non-working live migration, and at that point, Xen
would be the only alternative.

Thanks to Faidon for the heads-up on the heads-up on this migration
problem!


Kind regards,
--Toni++


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Pasi Kärkkäinen]

On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 01:34:24PM +0200, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 07:01:59AM +, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 04:53:56PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> > > Hi folks,
> > > 
> > > There was a thread here a little while back about the status of Xen in
> > > future Debian releases.  It left me rather confused, and I'm hoping to
> > > find some answers (which I will then happily document in the wiki).
> > > 
> > > According to http://wiki.debian.org/SystemVirtualization :
> > > 
> > > "Qemu and KVM - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
> > > 
> > Yes - but also the only game in town for cross platform emulation.
> > 
> > KVM is shaping up well and appears to be very well supported by Red Hat.
> > 
> > > "VirtualBox - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
> > 
> > Who knows what will happen to this now that Oracle own it? It's possible 
> > it will be merged in one of their other products like Virtual Iron.
> > 
> > > 
> > > "Xen - Provides para-virtualization and full-virtualization. Mostly used
> > > on servers. Will be abandoned after squeeze."
> > > 
> > 
> > I think that the problem here is that Xen isn't mainstream in the 
> > kernel. It takes a long time for a Xen-ified kernel to come out and any 
> > distribution supporting it has to carry a heavy patch burden. Xen 
> > doesn't keep anywhere current in terms of kernel - if we release Squeeze 
> > this year with kernel 2.6.3*, Debian will have to maintain all the patches
> > / "forward port" them to 2.6.32 or 2.6.33 as was done with 2.6.2*. 
> > 
> 
> Xen folks are creating 'xen/stable' branch for the pv_ops dom0 kernel,
> which is tracking the long-term supported 2.6.32 kernel, which Squeeze
> will ship. Currently it's at 2.6.32.9.
> 
> So Xen dom0 support for Squeeze shouldn't be as problematic as the 
> Lenny 2.6.26 kernel was. (no other distro shipped 2.6.26 and it was 
> not a long-term maintained kernel).
> 
> Now it would be a good time for everyone to test and report any problems
> found from the pvops dom0 kernel; it's still a WIP (Work In Progress),
> and requires both the success and problem reports.
> 

Latest 'status report' of Xen pvops dom0 kernel git trees here:
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2010-03/msg00162.html

There's "xen/stable-2.6.32.x" branch now.

-- Pasi


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Ian Campbell]

On Fri, 2010-02-26 at 11:29 +0100, Olivier Bonvalet wrote:
> 
> But xen-tools have be removed from Squeeze, so I suppose it will be
> more difficult to create new installations (require much more work to
> replace the xen-create-image script). 

Squeeze (32- and 64-bit) and Lenny (32-bit only) both support
installation into a Xen domU using the regular Debian Installer,
including preseeding etc. Instructions for use can be seen at
. Squeeze even supports
installation from ISOs into a Xen domU (using the multiarch amd64+i386
+powerpc netinst ISO). 

Is there any way this functionality could be exposed via xen-tools to
make it easier to deploy? (I don't know if/how it would fit into the
xen-tools model).

Ian.
-- 
Ian Campbell

Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock.
-- Wynn Catlin


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xen-tools and Squeeze (was: Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond)

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

Olivier Bonvalet wrote:
> But xen-tools have be removed from Squeeze, so I suppose it will be more  
> difficult to create new installations (require much more work to replace  
> the xen-create-image script).

I took over upstream developement from Steve and I'm working on
reintroduction of xen-tools into sid/squeeze as announced on the
xen-tools users' mailing list and http://bugs.debian.org/569525

I plan to support xen-tools at least as long as there's Dom0 support
in Debian. Not sure what will come after that.

Current work is available at http://noone.org/hg/xen-tools/, but yet
untested since I'm currently building myself the necessary test
environment.

Any help in testing (and patches of course) is appreaciated.

I'm also happy about anyone who wants to jump on the bandwaggon. Would
probably move the repository over to collab-maint then.

Regards, Axel
-- 
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: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Pasi Kärkkäinen]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 07:01:59AM +, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 04:53:56PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > There was a thread here a little while back about the status of Xen in
> > future Debian releases.  It left me rather confused, and I'm hoping to
> > find some answers (which I will then happily document in the wiki).
> > 
> > According to http://wiki.debian.org/SystemVirtualization :
> > 
> > "Qemu and KVM - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
> > 
> Yes - but also the only game in town for cross platform emulation.
> 
> KVM is shaping up well and appears to be very well supported by Red Hat.
> 
> > "VirtualBox - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
> 
> Who knows what will happen to this now that Oracle own it? It's possible 
> it will be merged in one of their other products like Virtual Iron.
> 
> > 
> > "Xen - Provides para-virtualization and full-virtualization. Mostly used
> > on servers. Will be abandoned after squeeze."
> > 
> 
> I think that the problem here is that Xen isn't mainstream in the 
> kernel. It takes a long time for a Xen-ified kernel to come out and any 
> distribution supporting it has to carry a heavy patch burden. Xen 
> doesn't keep anywhere current in terms of kernel - if we release Squeeze 
> this year with kernel 2.6.3*, Debian will have to maintain all the patches
> / "forward port" them to 2.6.32 or 2.6.33 as was done with 2.6.2*. 
> 

Xen folks are creating 'xen/stable' branch for the pv_ops dom0 kernel,
which is tracking the long-term supported 2.6.32 kernel, which Squeeze
will ship. Currently it's at 2.6.32.9.

So Xen dom0 support for Squeeze shouldn't be as problematic as the 
Lenny 2.6.26 kernel was. (no other distro shipped 2.6.26 and it was 
not a long-term maintained kernel).

Now it would be a good time for everyone to test and report any problems
found from the pvops dom0 kernel; it's still a WIP (Work In Progress),
and requires both the success and problem reports.

-- Pasi


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Ian Campbell]

On Sun, 2010-02-28 at 01:03 +0300, William Pitcock wrote:
> - "Josip Rodin"  wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 01:23:07AM +0300, William Pitcock wrote:
> > > I am looking into packaging xenner already as a backup plan if I
> > cannot
> > > manage to fix some major reentrancy problems in the Xen dom0 code
> > > (Xensource 2.6.18 patches, the pvops stuff has it's own share of
> > problems
> > > and needs more evaluation).
> > 
> > The .18 dom0 patches are well on their way out from the perspective
> > of
> > both Debian and Xen upstream, so you might want to shift focus to the
> > pvops
> > branch instead.
> 
> I am well aware of that.  However, the pvops branch has several critical
> bugs:
> 
> - On a 8-way system, it reports 259GHz CPUs for all cores when booted under
> Xen;
> - The paravirtualized clock is 4 times slower then it should be in dom0
> mode;
> - The same reentrancy issues exist, as 

It is very much worth taking these issues to the xen-devel mailing list.

> the pvops work is mostly Jeremy forward porting the 2.6.18 code

That's not completely true. Things like the backend drivers are largely
forward ports (although new development work is also occurring in this
tree these days) but the core infrastructure (memory management,
interrupts etc) are rewritten from scratch for the pvops kernels.

> There are also no pvops dom0 kernel packages shipped by Debian yet, at
> least through official channels.
> 
> While you are correct that pvops is the future, right now it's no better
> reliability-wise then the 2.6.18 xensource patches... unfortunately tracking
> these reentrancy bugs (mostly deadlocks) down is a massive pain in the ass.

pvops may be "no better" than the 2.6.18 patches but pvops is the one
where there will be the possibility of gaining momentum/interest to get
the issues fixed.

Ian.

-- 
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Current Noise: Rammstein - Spring

It's not reality that's important, but how you perceive things.


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Josip Rodin]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 01:03:46AM +0300, William Pitcock wrote:
> There are also no pvops dom0 kernel packages shipped by Debian yet, at
> least through official channels.
> 
> While you are correct that pvops is the future, right now it's no better
> reliability-wise then the 2.6.18 xensource patches... unfortunately tracking
> these reentrancy bugs (mostly deadlocks) down is a massive pain in the ass.

Much of the discussion was with regard to squeeze, and with that in mind,
at this point it seems that the pvops branch should get there, but there
is currently no indication whatsoever that the old stable branch will.
I'm not getting in the discussion why or how that is, I'm just saying,
based on:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2009/10/msg00853.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2010/02/msg01290.html

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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[William Pitcock]

- "Josip Rodin"  wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 01:23:07AM +0300, William Pitcock wrote:
> > I am looking into packaging xenner already as a backup plan if I
> cannot
> > manage to fix some major reentrancy problems in the Xen dom0 code
> > (Xensource 2.6.18 patches, the pvops stuff has it's own share of
> problems
> > and needs more evaluation).
> 
> The .18 dom0 patches are well on their way out from the perspective
> of
> both Debian and Xen upstream, so you might want to shift focus to the
> pvops
> branch instead.

I am well aware of that.  However, the pvops branch has several critical
bugs:

- On a 8-way system, it reports 259GHz CPUs for all cores when booted under
Xen;
- The paravirtualized clock is 4 times slower then it should be in dom0
mode;
- The same reentrancy issues exist, as the pvops work is mostly Jeremy
forward porting the 2.6.18 code; a workaround is to dedicate one CPU core
to dom0 operations and pin it.

There are also no pvops dom0 kernel packages shipped by Debian yet, at
least through official channels.

While you are correct that pvops is the future, right now it's no better
reliability-wise then the 2.6.18 xensource patches... unfortunately tracking
these reentrancy bugs (mostly deadlocks) down is a massive pain in the ass.

William


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Tollef Fog Heen]

]] Faidon Liambotis 

| Beyond that, I've also seen filesystem corruption when using live
| migration and the filesystem cache hasn't been disabled -- an almost
| undocumented directive of libvirt's XML.
| 
| All in all, I'm wondering how people can call this "stable".

I would guess at most people not using live migration and so never
hitting those kinds of problems.

-- 
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UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Josip Rodin]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 11:06:57AM +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Marco d'Itri, le Fri 26 Feb 2010 02:38:33 +0100, a écrit :
> > On Feb 25, John Goerzen  wrote:
> > > 3a) What about Linux virtualization on servers that lack hardware
> > > virtualization support, which Xen supports but KVM doesn't?
> > Tough luck.
> > 
> > > 6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way?  What can I do
> > > to help with this point?
> > Remind people that Xen is dying and KVM is the present and the future.
> 
> No FUD, thanks.

FWIW I've been running a Xen dom0 2.6.31.x for a while now without problems
and it seems to have all the features I used with etch and lenny dom0
kernels. So I wouldn't say it's dying, instead it may be more appropriate
to call it a reinvigorated pensioner :)

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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Josip Rodin]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 10:35:36AM +, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 11:18:41AM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> > According to the wiki the plan is to have pv-ops merge into vanilla with
> > 2.6.34.
> 
> I just took a quick look at linux-next (which *should* have everything
> for 2.6.34 in it) doesn't show anything that looks obviously like this,
> though I only looked briefly.

I'm assuming this was about http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenParavirtOps
section "Current state". That bit has always been optimistic, but I'd
recommend reviewing the "Status updates" subsection and particularly
Jeremy Fitzhardinge's November presentation.

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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Josip Rodin]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 11:18:41AM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> >> "Xen - Provides para-virtualization and full-virtualization. Mostly used
> >> on servers. Will be abandoned after squeeze."
> >
> > I think that the problem here is that Xen isn't mainstream in the 
> > kernel. It takes a long time for a Xen-ified kernel to come out and any 
> > distribution supporting it has to carry a heavy patch burden. Xen 
> > doesn't keep anywhere current in terms of kernel - if we release Squeeze 
> > this year with kernel 2.6.3*, Debian will have to maintain all the patches
> > / "forward port" them to 2.6.32 or 2.6.33 as was done with 2.6.2*. 
> 
> I think we can all agree that the old style xen patches from 2.6.18 and
> forward ported to newer kernels in lenny are unmaintainable.
> 
> But the pv-ops xen kernel is shaping up well and that is what Bastian
> Banks is working on. They have a proper upstream and follow the latest
> vanilla kernel well enough. According to the wiki the plan is to have
> pv-ops merge into vanilla with 2.6.34.

Let's not concentrate too much on having dom0 support in mainline, because
that is not a panacea - we (Debian) just need a stable Xen patch that tracks
the current stabler-mainline branch or whatever we're targeting for our
stable release, and has some sort of a forseeable future maintenance path.

We have shipped .26 patches in lenny and they turned out to be really buggy
in some cases (domU .26 kernels with vcpus >= 1 can get random freezes on
.26 dom0), and it's not getting fixed because that patch branch is EOL'd.
That's worse of a problem for users than some theoretical later abandoning.

Since we're concentrating on .32 now, the paravirt_ops branch looks good,
because Xen upstream agreed to form their own .32 stable branch of that.
So whether they succeed in a mainline merge for .34 or .35 or .36 or even
later, that's irrelevant, we will still have support for the squeeze kernel.

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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Martin Wuertele]

* John Goerzen  [2010-02-27 17:09]:

> How does libvirt impact performance?

Guess I cunfused libvirt with virtio.

Regards, Martin


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Josip Rodin]

On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 01:23:07AM +0300, William Pitcock wrote:
> I am looking into packaging xenner already as a backup plan if I cannot
> manage to fix some major reentrancy problems in the Xen dom0 code
> (Xensource 2.6.18 patches, the pvops stuff has it's own share of problems
> and needs more evaluation).

The .18 dom0 patches are well on their way out from the perspective of
both Debian and Xen upstream, so you might want to shift focus to the pvops
branch instead.

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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Josip Rodin]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 10:35:30AM +1100, Brian May wrote:
> On 26 February 2010 09:53, John Goerzen  wrote:
> > According to http://wiki.debian.org/SystemVirtualization :
> >
> > "Qemu and KVM - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
> >
> > "VirtualBox - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
> >
> > "Xen - Provides para-virtualization and full-virtualization. Mostly used
> > on servers. Will be abandoned after squeeze."
> 
> This doesn't help answer your questions (which I am interested in
> knowing the answers too), however there is also lxc - Linux Containers
> which may be another solution for some problems. It is not a
> replacement for any of the above however.

LXC is the future replacement of our OpenVZ kernel packages. However,
reportedly it's not nearly as stable yet.

At the same time, the OpenVZ upstream git has only made it as far as
mainline .27. See: http://git.openvz.org/ Unless they shift up to .32
soonish, or someone packages the .27 kernel in Debian, we're unlikely
to see continued support for it in squeeze. :/

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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Faidon Liambotis]

Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Feb 26, Luca Capello  wrote:
> 
 5) Do we recommend that new installations of lenny or of squeeze avoid
 Xen for ease of upgrading to squeeze+1?  If so, what should they use?
>>> It depends. KVM in lenny is buggy and lacks important features. While it
>>> works fine for development and casual use I do not recommend using it in
>>> production for critical tasks.
>> Is the qemu-kvm backport the "correct" solution, then?
> You also need a recent kvm driver in the host, so probably you should
> just use a newer kernel at least in the host.
> I have tens of lenny guests (with their standard kernels) on RHEL 5.4
> hosts and so far I had no issues, but so far most guests are not heavily
> loaded.
The biggest problem for me (and work) right now is live migration. Among
other things, there are known, fixed-but-not-yet-upstream issues with
the KVM paravirt clock which prevents live migration from working.
Unfortunately, there's also no way to disable the paravirt clock from
the host unless you patch qemu or wrap ioctl() and filter the capability
(I did the latter).

Beyond that, I've also seen filesystem corruption when using live
migration and the filesystem cache hasn't been disabled -- an almost
undocumented directive of libvirt's XML.

All in all, I'm wondering how people can call this "stable".

Regards,
Faidon


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[John Goerzen]

Martin Wuertele wrote:
> * Goswin von Brederlow  [2010-02-26 11:19]:
> 
>>> KVM is shaping up well and appears to be very well supported by Red Hat.
>> But still slower and less secure due to qemu.
> 
> Can you back that statement with numbers? My subjective impression is
> that kvm with libvirt is not slower than xen.

How does libvirt impact performance?

> 
> Regards, Martin
> 
> 


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Martin Wuertele]

* Goswin von Brederlow  [2010-02-26 11:19]:

> > KVM is shaping up well and appears to be very well supported by Red Hat.
> 
> But still slower and less secure due to qemu.

Can you back that statement with numbers? My subjective impression is
that kvm with libvirt is not slower than xen.

Regards, Martin


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[William Pitcock]

Hi,

- "Michael Tautschnig"  wrote:

> First of all, I'd like to say a big THANKS to all the people
> maintaining Xen
> within (in of course also outside) Debian; you really saved us lots of
> money and
> energy (which is both, electrical and that personal one). 
> 
> [...]
> 
> > 
> > > 4) What will be our preferred server virtualization option for
> non-Linux
> > > guests after squeeze?  Still KVM?
> > Yes, virtualized Windows works much better in (modern) KVM than
> Xen.
> > 
> > > 5) Do we recommend that new installations of lenny or of squeeze
> avoid
> > > Xen for ease of upgrading to squeeze+1?  If so, what should they
> use?
> > It depends. KVM in lenny is buggy and lacks important features.
> While it
> > works fine for development and casual use I do not recommend using
> it in
> > production for critical tasks.
> > This is where Red Hat really beats us: RHEL shipped Xen years ago
> but
> > recently they released an update which provides a backported and
> > stabilized KVM.
> > 
> > > 6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way?  What
> can I do
> > > to help with this point?
> > Remind people that Xen is dying and KVM is the present and the
> future.
> > 
> 
> As I understand the later mails of Bastian and Ian, this is probably
> not an
> issue anyway, but still I'd like to note it: Even though KVM may have
> a
> promising future (on hardware with virtualization support, at least),
> there is a
> serious need for a nice migration path. It seems impossible to
> dist-upgrade to
> squeeze and switch from Xen to KVM at the same time.

Such a migration path already exists: xenner, but it needs to be packaged,
and possibly updated to work with newer Xen hypercalls (such as those introduced
since Xen 3.1).

I am looking into packaging xenner already as a backup plan if I cannot
manage to fix some major reentrancy problems in the Xen dom0 code (Xensource
2.6.18 patches, the pvops stuff has it's own share of problems and needs
more evaluation).

William


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Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond Summary

[John Goerzen]

Thank you for the conversation on this.  I would like to summarize what
people have been saying -- it seems there is still a lot of disagreement
about things out there yet, and I'm not entirely certain about things
yet, but this has been helpful.

I'll include my original email with comments from people posting in this
thread mixed in.

According to http://wiki.debian.org/SystemVirtualization :

"Qemu and KVM - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"

"VirtualBox - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"

"Xen - Provides para-virtualization and full-virtualization. Mostly used
on servers. Will be abandoned after squeeze."

 + Andrew M. A. Cater: Xen doesn't keep anywhere current in terms of
kernel - if we release Squeeze this year with kernel 2.6.3*, Debian will
have to maintain all the patches/ "forward port" them to 2.6.32 or
2.6.33 as was done with 2.6.2*.

 + Goswin von Brederlow: I think we can all agree that the old style xen
patches from 2.6.18 and forward ported to newer kernels in lenny are
unmaintainable. But the pv-ops xen kernel is shaping up well and that is
what Bastian Banks is working on. They have a proper upstream and follow
the latest vanilla kernel well enough. According to the wiki the plan is
to have pv-ops merge into vanilla with 2.6.34.

 + Olivier Bonvalet: Linux dom0 kernel from Lenny doesn't work at all on
some hardware with recent pv_ops domu.  In that case you have to change
to a different version...

The Xen page on the wiki makes no mention of this.

So, I am wondering about our direction in this way:


*** 1) Will a squeeze system be able to run the Xen hypervisor?  A Xen dom0?

 + Ben Hutchings: Maybe.  Ian Campbell and Bastian Blank are working on it.

 + Bastian Blank: [re hypervisor] Why not? I see packages laying around.
[re dom0] Most likely yes.  I'm currently ironing out the obvious bugs.


*** 2) Will a squeeze system be able to be installed as a Xen domU with
a lenny dom0?  What about squeeze+1?

 + Ben Hutchings: lenny's xen-flavour kernels (needed for dom0, optional
for domU) are not supportable even now.

 + Bastian Blank: Yes. It should even run on RHEL 5.

 + Olivier Bonvalet: I have a Debian squeeze running on a Lenny Dom0
Xen.  Today it seem to works.


*** 3) What will be our preferred Linux server virtualization option
after squeeze?  Are we confident enough in the stability and performance
of KVM to call it such?  (Last I checked, its paravirt support was of
rather iffy stability and performance, but I could be off.)

 + Marco d'Itri: [regarding KVM stability]: Yes. [regarding my
impressions of KVM being wrong]: You are, KVM had huge changes in the
last year.

 + Andrew M.A. Cater: KVM is shaping up well and appears to be very well
supported by Red Hat.

 + Goswin von Brederlow: [to Cater] But still slower and less secure due
to qemu.


*** 3a) What about Linux virtualization on servers that lack hardware
virtualization support, which Xen supports but KVM doesn't?

Marco d'Itri: Tough luck.


*** 4) What will be our preferred server virtualization option for
non-Linux guests after squeeze?  Still KVM?

 + Marco d'Itri: Yes, virtualized Windows works much better in (modern)
KVM than Xen.


*** 5) Do we recommend that new installations of lenny or of squeeze
avoid Xen for ease of upgrading to squeeze+1?  If so, what should they use?

 + Ben Hutchings: I would discourage use of the xen-flavour in lenny.

 + Marco d'Itri: It depends. KVM in lenny is buggy and lacks important
features. While it works fine for development and casual use I do not
recommend using it in production for critical tasks. This is where Red
Hat really beats us: RHEL shipped Xen years ago but recently they
released an update which provides a backported and stabilized KVM.

 + Andrew M. A. Cater: New Squeeze - use KVM? New Lenny - whatever you
want, because at this point you have (days until release of Squeeze + 1
year) to find an alternative.

*** 6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way?  What can
I do to help with this point?

 + Marco d'Itri: Remind people that Xen is dying and KVM is the present
and the future.

 + Samuel Thibault: [to Marco] No FUD, thanks.

-- John


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Michael Tautschnig]

First of all, I'd like to say a big THANKS to all the people maintaining Xen
within (in of course also outside) Debian; you really saved us lots of money and
energy (which is both, electrical and that personal one). 

[...]

> 
> > 4) What will be our preferred server virtualization option for non-Linux
> > guests after squeeze?  Still KVM?
> Yes, virtualized Windows works much better in (modern) KVM than Xen.
> 
> > 5) Do we recommend that new installations of lenny or of squeeze avoid
> > Xen for ease of upgrading to squeeze+1?  If so, what should they use?
> It depends. KVM in lenny is buggy and lacks important features. While it
> works fine for development and casual use I do not recommend using it in
> production for critical tasks.
> This is where Red Hat really beats us: RHEL shipped Xen years ago but
> recently they released an update which provides a backported and
> stabilized KVM.
> 
> > 6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way?  What can I do
> > to help with this point?
> Remind people that Xen is dying and KVM is the present and the future.
> 

As I understand the later mails of Bastian and Ian, this is probably not an
issue anyway, but still I'd like to note it: Even though KVM may have a
promising future (on hardware with virtualization support, at least), there is a
serious need for a nice migration path. It seems impossible to dist-upgrade to
squeeze and switch from Xen to KVM at the same time.

Thanks everyone,
Michael



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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Marco d'Itri]

On Feb 26, Luca Capello  wrote:

> >> 5) Do we recommend that new installations of lenny or of squeeze avoid
> >> Xen for ease of upgrading to squeeze+1?  If so, what should they use?
> > It depends. KVM in lenny is buggy and lacks important features. While it
> > works fine for development and casual use I do not recommend using it in
> > production for critical tasks.
> Is the qemu-kvm backport the "correct" solution, then?
You also need a recent kvm driver in the host, so probably you should
just use a newer kernel at least in the host.
I have tens of lenny guests (with their standard kernels) on RHEL 5.4
hosts and so far I had no issues, but so far most guests are not heavily
loaded.

-- 
ciao,
Marco


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Luca Capello]

Hi there!

On Fri, 26 Feb 2010 02:38:33 +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Feb 25, John Goerzen  wrote:
>> 5) Do we recommend that new installations of lenny or of squeeze avoid
>> Xen for ease of upgrading to squeeze+1?  If so, what should they use?
> It depends. KVM in lenny is buggy and lacks important features. While it
> works fine for development and casual use I do not recommend using it in
> production for critical tasks.

Is the qemu-kvm backport the "correct" solution, then?

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Ian Campbell]

On Fri, 2010-02-26 at 11:58 +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Feb 26, Petter Reinholdtsen  wrote:
> 
> > I understand the pain of maintaining Xen, but believe it is bad idea
> > to defend replacing it with kvm by claiming those needing
> > virtualization and not having servers with hardware support are few
> > and should just get new servers.
> Obviously these people can start maintaining Xen themselves...

Um, they are?

There are people (myself included) who are committed to maintaining Xen
stuff in squeeze, so what is the problem?

Ian.
-- 
Ian Campbell

Work smarter, not harder, and be careful of your speling.


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[John Goerzen]

Bastian Blank wrote:
> 
> Did we ever had something "preferred"? 

Not officially, but there were clearly better solutions for different
situations.

-- John

> 
> Bastian
> 


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[John Goerzen]

Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> I understand the pain of maintaining Xen, but believe it is bad idea
> to defend replacing it with kvm by claiming those needing
> virtualization and not having servers with hardware support are few
> and should just get new servers.

Agreed.  At work, we made a major purchase of Opteron servers in 2006.
Many of them don't have HW virtualization support, and yet are still
perfectly fine servers, happily running Xen to this day.

-- John


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Marco d'Itri]

On Feb 26, Philipp Kern  wrote:

> Wow, logic.  Because they don't have monetary resources to buy new
> servers they have a vast amount of time instead?
Why should they expect other people to solve their problems for them?
Free software is not about other people working in your place.

-- 
ciao,
Marco


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Philipp Kern]

On 2010-02-26, Marco d'Itri  wrote:
> On Feb 26, Petter Reinholdtsen  wrote:
>> I understand the pain of maintaining Xen, but believe it is bad idea
>> to defend replacing it with kvm by claiming those needing
>> virtualization and not having servers with hardware support are few
>> and should just get new servers.
> Obviously these people can start maintaining Xen themselves...

Wow, logic.  Because they don't have monetary resources to buy new
servers they have a vast amount of time instead?

Kind regards,
Philipp Kern


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Marco d'Itri]

On Feb 26, Petter Reinholdtsen  wrote:

> I understand the pain of maintaining Xen, but believe it is bad idea
> to defend replacing it with kvm by claiming those needing
> virtualization and not having servers with hardware support are few
> and should just get new servers.
Obviously these people can start maintaining Xen themselves...

-- 
ciao,
Marco


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Mark Brown]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 11:18:41AM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:

> But the pv-ops xen kernel is shaping up well and that is what Bastian
> Banks is working on. They have a proper upstream and follow the latest
> vanilla kernel well enough. According to the wiki the plan is to have
> pv-ops merge into vanilla with 2.6.34.

I just took a quick look at linux-next (which *should* have everything
for 2.6.34 in it) doesn't show anything that looks obviously like this,
though I only looked briefly.


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Olivier Bonvalet]

Hi,

1) in Lenny I use the Xen hypervisor 3.4 from Squeeze, so it works.
The main problem is that the linux dom0 patch is not (yet) upstream, and 
Debian can't really maintain it.

But we hope, it will be accepted upstream, a lot of works have be done.
As you can see on the Xen wiki 
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenDom0Kernels , "Xen 4.0 switched to 
using Linux pv_ops based dom0 kernel as a default. This is the kernel 
all users should be using and testing, and all the development should be 
made against this kernel tree."
So we already use that version for testing (and I use it for production 
too... with some limitations).


But xen-tools have be removed from Squeeze, so I suppose it will be more 
difficult to create new installations (require much more work to replace 
the xen-create-image script).


2) Well, I have a Debian squeeze running on a Lenny Dom0 Xen. Today it 
seem to works.


3) LXC, Xen, KVM, or others. You choose what you want no ? I dislike 
KVM, except on desktops.


5) Linux dom0 kernel from Lenny doesn't work at all on some hardware 
with recent pv_ops domu. In that case you have to change to a different 
version...



But I'm not a debian developper.

Olivier

On 25/02/2010 23:53, John Goerzen wrote:

Hi folks,

There was a thread here a little while back about the status of Xen in
future Debian releases.  It left me rather confused, and I'm hoping to
find some answers (which I will then happily document in the wiki).

According to http://wiki.debian.org/SystemVirtualization :

"Qemu and KVM - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"

"VirtualBox - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"

"Xen - Provides para-virtualization and full-virtualization. Mostly used
on servers. Will be abandoned after squeeze."

The Xen page on the wiki makes no mention of this.

So, I am wondering about our direction in this way:

1) Will a squeeze system be able to run the Xen hypervisor?  A Xen dom0?

2) Will a squeeze system be able to be installed as a Xen domU with a
lenny dom0?  What about squeeze+1?

3) What will be our preferred Linux server virtualization option after
squeeze?  Are we confident enough in the stability and performance of
KVM to call it such?  (Last I checked, its paravirt support was of
rather iffy stability and performance, but I could be off.)

3a) What about Linux virtualization on servers that lack hardware
virtualization support, which Xen supports but KVM doesn't?

4) What will be our preferred server virtualization option for non-Linux
guests after squeeze?  Still KVM?

5) Do we recommend that new installations of lenny or of squeeze avoid
Xen for ease of upgrading to squeeze+1?  If so, what should they use?

6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way?  What can I do
to help with this point?

Thanks,

-- John


   



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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Goswin von Brederlow]

"Andrew M.A. Cater"  writes:

> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 04:53:56PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>> 
>> There was a thread here a little while back about the status of Xen in
>> future Debian releases.  It left me rather confused, and I'm hoping to
>> find some answers (which I will then happily document in the wiki).
>> 
>> According to http://wiki.debian.org/SystemVirtualization :
>> 
>> "Qemu and KVM - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
>> 
> Yes - but also the only game in town for cross platform emulation.
>
> KVM is shaping up well and appears to be very well supported by Red Hat.

But still slower and less secure due to qemu.

>> "VirtualBox - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
>
> Who knows what will happen to this now that Oracle own it? It's possible 
> it will be merged in one of their other products like Virtual Iron.
>
>> 
>> "Xen - Provides para-virtualization and full-virtualization. Mostly used
>> on servers. Will be abandoned after squeeze."
>> 
>
> I think that the problem here is that Xen isn't mainstream in the 
> kernel. It takes a long time for a Xen-ified kernel to come out and any 
> distribution supporting it has to carry a heavy patch burden. Xen 
> doesn't keep anywhere current in terms of kernel - if we release Squeeze 
> this year with kernel 2.6.3*, Debian will have to maintain all the patches
> / "forward port" them to 2.6.32 or 2.6.33 as was done with 2.6.2*. 

I think we can all agree that the old style xen patches from 2.6.18 and
forward ported to newer kernels in lenny are unmaintainable.

But the pv-ops xen kernel is shaping up well and that is what Bastian
Banks is working on. They have a proper upstream and follow the latest
vanilla kernel well enough. According to the wiki the plan is to have
pv-ops merge into vanilla with 2.6.34.

>> The Xen page on the wiki makes no mention of this.
>> 
>> So, I am wondering about our direction in this way:
>> 
>> 1) Will a squeeze system be able to run the Xen hypervisor?  A Xen dom0?
>> 
>> 2) Will a squeeze system be able to be installed as a Xen domU with a
>> lenny dom0?  What about squeeze+1?
>> 
>> 3) What will be our preferred Linux server virtualization option after
>> squeeze?  Are we confident enough in the stability and performance of
>> KVM to call it such?  (Last I checked, its paravirt support was of
>> rather iffy stability and performance, but I could be off.)
>> 
>> 3a) What about Linux virtualization on servers that lack hardware
>> virtualization support, which Xen supports but KVM doesn't?
>> 
>
> Which servers that lack hardware virtualisation support - 
> pretty much everything made in the last two or three years has it. For 
> servers,
> specifically, the likelihood is that - Lenny has a 2 year life + 1 year, 
> Squeeze has ? year life + 1 year - by the time you get to Squeeze + 1 
> anything that doesn't will be almost ten years old. QEMU will work. 
> Non-Intel - ARM, PPC ... may be another matter.

Just end of last year I bought myself a nice POV/ION330 board (Atom 330
cpu) with 4GB ram. Makes no noise, eats little power and can decode
movies in hardware. The ideal desktop for a non-gamer. But no kvm
support.

There are still a lot of cpus being made that don't have hvm. And
systems are being used longer than 10 years too. My Amiga is coming up
on 20 years. :) Hey, even last years I saw someone asking about actual
i386 support.

And what about ia64? Does kvm support that?

>> 4) What will be our preferred server virtualization option for non-Linux
>> guests after squeeze?  Still KVM?
>> 
>> 5) Do we recommend that new installations of lenny or of squeeze avoid
>> Xen for ease of upgrading to squeeze+1?  If so, what should they use?
>> 
>
> New Squeeze - use KVM? New Lenny - whatever you want, because at this 
> point you have (days until release of Squeeze + 1 year) to find an 
> alternative.
>
>> 6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way?  What can I do
>> to help with this point?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> -- John
>> 
>>
>
> Just my 0.02c
>
> AndyC

MfG
Goswin


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Samuel Thibault]

Marco d'Itri, le Fri 26 Feb 2010 02:38:33 +0100, a écrit :
> On Feb 25, John Goerzen  wrote:
> > 3a) What about Linux virtualization on servers that lack hardware
> > virtualization support, which Xen supports but KVM doesn't?
> Tough luck.
> 
> > 6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way?  What can I do
> > to help with this point?
> Remind people that Xen is dying and KVM is the present and the future.

No FUD, thanks.

Samuel


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Bastian Blank]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 04:53:56PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> "Xen - Provides para-virtualization and full-virtualization. Mostly used
> on servers. Will be abandoned after squeeze."
> The Xen page on the wiki makes no mention of this.

Well, I don't know where this conclusion comes from. But usually the
maintainers are responsible for such decisions.

> 1) Will a squeeze system be able to run the Xen hypervisor?

Why not? I see packages laying around.

> 1)   A Xen dom0?

Most likely yes. I'm currently ironing out the obvious bugs.

> 2) Will a squeeze system be able to be installed as a Xen domU with a
> lenny dom0?  What about squeeze+1?

Yes. It should even run on RHEL 5.

> 3) What will be our preferred Linux server virtualization option after
> squeeze?  Are we confident enough in the stability and performance of
> KVM to call it such?  (Last I checked, its paravirt support was of
> rather iffy stability and performance, but I could be off.)

Did we ever had something "preferred"? 

Bastian

-- 
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-- Spock, "The Lights of Zetar", stardate 5725.6


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Andrew M.A. Cater]
> Which servers that lack hardware virtualisation support - pretty
> much everything made in the last two or three years has it. For
> servers, specifically, the likelihood is that - Lenny has a 2 year
> life + 1 year, Squeeze has ? year life + 1 year - by the time you
> get to Squeeze + 1 anything that doesn't will be almost ten years
> old. QEMU will work.  Non-Intel - ARM, PPC ... may be another
> matter.

It is hard to predict, especially about the future.  :)

Anyway, as a simple data point, I can report that none of the 4
servers used by the Debian Edu project support hardware
virtualization, and thus we can not use KVM and use Xen instead.  I
expect these servers to live for several more years.

I understand the pain of maintaining Xen, but believe it is bad idea
to defend replacing it with kvm by claiming those needing
virtualization and not having servers with hardware support are few
and should just get new servers.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 04:53:56PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> There was a thread here a little while back about the status of Xen in
> future Debian releases.  It left me rather confused, and I'm hoping to
> find some answers (which I will then happily document in the wiki).
> 
> According to http://wiki.debian.org/SystemVirtualization :
> 
> "Qemu and KVM - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
> 
Yes - but also the only game in town for cross platform emulation.

KVM is shaping up well and appears to be very well supported by Red Hat.

> "VirtualBox - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"

Who knows what will happen to this now that Oracle own it? It's possible 
it will be merged in one of their other products like Virtual Iron.

> 
> "Xen - Provides para-virtualization and full-virtualization. Mostly used
> on servers. Will be abandoned after squeeze."
> 

I think that the problem here is that Xen isn't mainstream in the 
kernel. It takes a long time for a Xen-ified kernel to come out and any 
distribution supporting it has to carry a heavy patch burden. Xen 
doesn't keep anywhere current in terms of kernel - if we release Squeeze 
this year with kernel 2.6.3*, Debian will have to maintain all the patches
/ "forward port" them to 2.6.32 or 2.6.33 as was done with 2.6.2*. 

Red Hat will support Xen for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x, for example, 
primarily because it was there for 5.0 on 2.6.18. Red Hat now have a 7 
year commitment to a support lifecycle based on one kernel
release. The Red Hat kernel is already heavily patched (and takes 
18 months or so to release - by the time they stop supporting 5.x, 
the code will be almost 9 years old) - and the back patching of 
security fixes and requested features through the support lifecycle is 
a nightmare for them. I'd be slightly surprised if they commit to Xen 
through the lifecycle of their version 6.x.

> The Xen page on the wiki makes no mention of this.
> 
> So, I am wondering about our direction in this way:
> 
> 1) Will a squeeze system be able to run the Xen hypervisor?  A Xen dom0?
> 
> 2) Will a squeeze system be able to be installed as a Xen domU with a
> lenny dom0?  What about squeeze+1?
> 
> 3) What will be our preferred Linux server virtualization option after
> squeeze?  Are we confident enough in the stability and performance of
> KVM to call it such?  (Last I checked, its paravirt support was of
> rather iffy stability and performance, but I could be off.)
> 
> 3a) What about Linux virtualization on servers that lack hardware
> virtualization support, which Xen supports but KVM doesn't?
> 

Which servers that lack hardware virtualisation support - 
pretty much everything made in the last two or three years has it. For servers,
specifically, the likelihood is that - Lenny has a 2 year life + 1 year, 
Squeeze has ? year life + 1 year - by the time you get to Squeeze + 1 
anything that doesn't will be almost ten years old. QEMU will work. 
Non-Intel - ARM, PPC ... may be another matter.

> 4) What will be our preferred server virtualization option for non-Linux
> guests after squeeze?  Still KVM?
> 
> 5) Do we recommend that new installations of lenny or of squeeze avoid
> Xen for ease of upgrading to squeeze+1?  If so, what should they use?
> 

New Squeeze - use KVM? New Lenny - whatever you want, because at this 
point you have (days until release of Squeeze + 1 year) to find an 
alternative.

> 6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way?  What can I do
> to help with this point?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -- John
> 
>

Just my 0.02c

AndyC
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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Marco d'Itri]

On Feb 25, John Goerzen  wrote:

> 3) What will be our preferred Linux server virtualization option after
> squeeze?  Are we confident enough in the stability and performance of
> KVM to call it such?  (Last I checked, its paravirt support was of
Yes.

> rather iffy stability and performance, but I could be off.)
You are, KVM had huge changes in the last year.

> 3a) What about Linux virtualization on servers that lack hardware
> virtualization support, which Xen supports but KVM doesn't?
Tough luck.

> 4) What will be our preferred server virtualization option for non-Linux
> guests after squeeze?  Still KVM?
Yes, virtualized Windows works much better in (modern) KVM than Xen.

> 5) Do we recommend that new installations of lenny or of squeeze avoid
> Xen for ease of upgrading to squeeze+1?  If so, what should they use?
It depends. KVM in lenny is buggy and lacks important features. While it
works fine for development and casual use I do not recommend using it in
production for critical tasks.
This is where Red Hat really beats us: RHEL shipped Xen years ago but
recently they released an update which provides a backported and
stabilized KVM.

> 6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way?  What can I do
> to help with this point?
Remind people that Xen is dying and KVM is the present and the future.

-- 
ciao,
Marco


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Ben Hutchings]

On Thu, 2010-02-25 at 16:53 -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> There was a thread here a little while back about the status of Xen in
> future Debian releases.  It left me rather confused, and I'm hoping to
> find some answers (which I will then happily document in the wiki).

You're asking on the wrong list - this is a topic for debian-kernel.

> According to http://wiki.debian.org/SystemVirtualization :
> 
> "Qemu and KVM - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
> 
> "VirtualBox - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
> 
> "Xen - Provides para-virtualization and full-virtualization. Mostly used
> on servers. Will be abandoned after squeeze."
> 
> The Xen page on the wiki makes no mention of this.
> 
> So, I am wondering about our direction in this way:
> 
> 1) Will a squeeze system be able to run the Xen hypervisor?  A Xen dom0?

Maybe.  Ian Campbell and Bastian Blank are working on it.

> 2) Will a squeeze system be able to be installed as a Xen domU with a
> lenny dom0?  What about squeeze+1?

lenny's xen-flavour kernels (needed for dom0, optional for domU) are not
supportable even now.

[...]
> 5) Do we recommend that new installations of lenny or of squeeze avoid
> Xen for ease of upgrading to squeeze+1?  If so, what should they use?
[...]

I would discourage use of the xen-flavour in lenny.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
I'm always amazed by the number of people who take up solipsism because
they heard someone else explain it. - E*Borg on alt.fan.pratchett


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Re: Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[Brian May]

On 26 February 2010 09:53, John Goerzen  wrote:
> According to http://wiki.debian.org/SystemVirtualization :
>
> "Qemu and KVM - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
>
> "VirtualBox - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"
>
> "Xen - Provides para-virtualization and full-virtualization. Mostly used
> on servers. Will be abandoned after squeeze."

This doesn't help answer your questions (which I am interested in
knowing the answers too), however there is also lxc - Linux Containers
which may be another solution for some problems. It is not a
replacement for any of the above however.
-- 
Brian May 


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Xen, Squeeze, and Beyond

[John Goerzen]

Hi folks,

There was a thread here a little while back about the status of Xen in
future Debian releases.  It left me rather confused, and I'm hoping to
find some answers (which I will then happily document in the wiki).

According to http://wiki.debian.org/SystemVirtualization :

"Qemu and KVM - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"

"VirtualBox - Mostly used on Desktops/Laptops"

"Xen - Provides para-virtualization and full-virtualization. Mostly used
on servers. Will be abandoned after squeeze."

The Xen page on the wiki makes no mention of this.

So, I am wondering about our direction in this way:

1) Will a squeeze system be able to run the Xen hypervisor?  A Xen dom0?

2) Will a squeeze system be able to be installed as a Xen domU with a
lenny dom0?  What about squeeze+1?

3) What will be our preferred Linux server virtualization option after
squeeze?  Are we confident enough in the stability and performance of
KVM to call it such?  (Last I checked, its paravirt support was of
rather iffy stability and performance, but I could be off.)

3a) What about Linux virtualization on servers that lack hardware
virtualization support, which Xen supports but KVM doesn't?

4) What will be our preferred server virtualization option for non-Linux
guests after squeeze?  Still KVM?

5) Do we recommend that new installations of lenny or of squeeze avoid
Xen for ease of upgrading to squeeze+1?  If so, what should they use?

6) Are we communicating this to Debian users in some way?  What can I do
to help with this point?

Thanks,

-- John


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