Re: [Xen-users] Plans to require CPU VT flag?

[Christopher Myers <cmyers@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On Wed, 2017-12-20 at 09:58 +0000, George Dunlap wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 9:58 PM, Christopher Myers <cmyers@millikin.e
> du> wrote:
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> > Out of curiosity, are there any plans to *require* the VT CPU flag
> > in
> > Xen at any point in the foreseeable future? The reason I ask is
> > because
> > my server at home doesn't support them, so I want to beware of any
> > version that would break my current setup.
> > 
> > Right now I've got four PV VMs running on my Xen box (4.8.3 on
> > Debian
> > Stretch,) and am perfectly content with its performance :)
> 
> At the moment it's not possible to boot Xen without a PV domain 0 (on
> x86). :-)
> 
> We are working on allowing PVH dom0 (which requires HVM* support),
> but
> that won't be ready until 4.11 or 4.12; even if we were planning on
> phasing it out, it wouldn't be possible for several years.
> 
> But, there is no intention at this point of phasing out PV.  As you
> say, there continues to be lots of x86 hardware (even new hardware)
> that doesn't have HVM support; for those platforms Xen will be
> basically the only option.

Awesome, thanks very much :)

It really is amazing how much you can do with Xen. My setup is an Aaeon
EMB CV1 A11 industrial motherboard (Atom D2550 processor) with 4GB of
memory. On that I'm able to run four Debian Stretch PV DomU's without
issue --
 - asterisk VOIP server
 - nginx reverse proxy
 - dedicated bind9 VM
 - "the everything" vm, running the usual LAMP stack, minecraft server,
rsyslog aggregator, nextcloud, secondary bind9 instance, email server,
mantisbt, and about a half dozen other applications.

When you think about the fact that this is, in reality, running off of
two (not overly powerful) CPU cores, and performs very smoothly on top
of all that...



(At work we have slightly more powerful hardware running the software
;) But all of those VMs are HVM.)



> 
> This is speaking of the upstream XenProject of course; individual
> downstream vendors may of course make different strategic decisions.
> 
> Peace,
>  -George
> 
> * VT is the Intel-specific name; HVM is the generic term fro hardware
> virtualization support on either Intel or AMD.
> 
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