Re: [Xen-users] Best way to get Xen into Ubuntu Natty/64bit

[Florian Heigl <florian.heigl@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

2011/11/15 Niels Dettenbach <nd@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> Am Dienstag, 15. November 2011, 15:00:57 schrieb Florian Heigl:
>> SUSE might in some fashion be the best, well-rounded smarted Linux
>> distro around. It might even have working Xen. And it looks like it
>> does.
>> But it doesn't support my disk controllers  and it makes my head hurt
>> so much. :/
>
> ...just another point to give a short recommendation to try a look at gentoo
> again and build your distro as you need it ;)

perfectly valid. I know at least one guy who ran his production Xen
hosts on Gentoo for quite some time. I had tested it and remember it
was the only distro where you could get close to using sHype and
others back then.

Vlan interface configuration is the other thing I remember from Gentoo
and that was not so great. That and the lack of (out of the box)
network installs was the reasons why I put away with it in the end. I
can install my oracle vm boxes in something around 4 minutes using
cobbler + kickstart into a defined state. I didn't see how that would
work using Gentoo.

CentOS 5 also has it's downsides. Running Ceph on that would be plain
impossible, and of course you'd totally not be running a distro kernel
for Xen there?
And I pretty much guess CentOS/RHEL 5 will also not boot if the
CentOS-binary-compatible OVM 2.2.2 panics upon disk detection.

It definitely needs to be something less 2006'ish than CentOS, thats
why I had given Ubuntu a shot.

Re: the person who was beta-testing the next SUSE update:
Maybe we should have a wiki page that just lists the features Xen
broken in each distro...

Anyway.
If I summarize this thread (in my always positive way) then I'm down to:
- Use manual build of Xen on Ubuntu or Debian
- Use CentOS 5 (can't since it wont work)
- Use CentOS 6 + GitCo (maybe?)
- Use SUSE (can't since hw not working and tendency to hurt self after
prolonged use)
- Fedora 16 (how about that!?)
- revisit Gentoo and spend 2-3 days getting all configured properly
before I can tell if it does what I want. Ah, and add another 5-6 days
to make Infiniband really work there
- Stuff FC16 kernel into CentOS6 (uh. that's not how we run servers out here?)
- Stop trying all of that and put my time into the Alpine Linux Xen
port. Meaning I'll have to fix anything I encounter and there's no
googling for issues.

Footnote:
Using some build like the xen testing one for RHEL6 is a road to hell.
I've done that a few times for RHEL5/RHEL6 and know well enough these
builds get rarely bugfixed, but never updated.
If something stops working then you're left on your own.
Probably most prominent would be the FreeBSD XenPV versions where
every 2 years one or another dev made one working install, tarred it
up and then went off to do something else because only the bugfixing
was left to do. And so you still see people trying to follow FreeBSD 7
instructions that refer to an image that is on a webserver that died 2
years ago. You get the idea.


Thanks for your inputs!

-- 
the purpose of libvirt is to provide an abstraction layer hiding all
xen features added since 2006 until they were finally understood and
copied by the kvm devs.

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