Re: [Xen-users] [Xen-devel] Xen 4.2.0 Release Plan / TODO

[Matt Wilson <msw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 07:53:07PM +0200, Mark van Dijk wrote:
> >> tools, nice to have:
> >
> >      * pygrub support for ext4 on rhel5/centos5.
> >        Roger already sent a patch for this.
> 
> I'd love to see some kind of extlinux (or grub2) that can replace the
> current pv-grub. Both support ext4 and, more importantly imho,
> btrfs, now that is one really cool filesystem.

Personally I'd love to see pv-extlinux. I chatted last week with some
folks at the Linux Plumbers Conference about this, and I think it
should be possible with a lot of work.

> Grub0.97 is/will be being deprecated on an increasing number of
> distributions. And pv-grub is safer than pygrub because pygrub executes
> in the dom0 and pv-grub in the domU, if I understand correctly.
> 
> Anyone willing to share thoughts on the possibility of 'pv-extlinux?'

I believe that syslinux only builds as 32-bit, and the elf output is
only an intermediate build target. Booting a 64-bit kernel with a
32-bit pv-extlinux won't work. Also, I'm not sure that you could load
the .elf output and do anything useful with it. I've heard a rumor
that a pure-C syslinux version is in the works, which could help with
this.

syslinux has a really decent subset of the standard C library in
com32/, and implementing the frontend drivers with it shouldn't not be
too hard. Building libxc against it might be another matter entirely.

GRUB2 is currently more popular than extlinux I think, and it might
lend itself to a PV port more readily. There was some initial work
that made grub-emu run on top of MiniOS [1], but I'm not sure that it
got much farther than that.

Matt

[1] http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2009-05/msg00666.html

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