No Xen development for 3.x any more

No Xen development for 3.x any more

[Benjamin Schweikert]

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Hi,
after thinking a lot about continuing xen as a hypervisor for ipfire 3.x (and after having talked to micha) I decided to not maintain Xen Hypervisor and Xen Userspace tools any more for now.

The reasons for this are:
- I will switch from xen to kvm with my systems and so I will not spend a lot of time reading xen mailing lists
- The Xen-Sourcecode is not really well "written" and documented
- This leads to a big effort in looking for patches because of the hardened system
- libvirt is not supported yet
- and finally: I don't have the time to spend several evenings bug fixing after each new released xen version.

Ben 

Re: No Xen development for 3.x any more

[R. W. Rodolico]

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I currently use ipFire under Xen, but this sounds like a whole lot of
work just for one or two Xen machines. I'm assuming it can simply be
installed by booting an HVM from the ISO? If not (if there would be
security holes by doing it), I can simply change to a stand alone.

Thank you very much for all the hard work.

Rod

On 02/07/2013 02:24 PM, Benjamin Schweikert wrote:
> Hi,
> after thinking a lot about continuing xen as a hypervisor for ipfire 3.x (and after having talked to micha) I decided to not maintain Xen Hypervisor and Xen Userspace tools any more for now.
> 
> The reasons for this are:
> - I will switch from xen to kvm with my systems and so I will not spend a lot of time reading xen mailing lists
> - The Xen-Sourcecode is not really well "written" and documented
> - This leads to a big effort in looking for patches because of the hardened system
> - libvirt is not supported yet
> - and finally: I don't have the time to spend several evenings bug fixing after each new released xen version.
> 
> Ben 
> _______________________________________________
> Development mailing list
> Development(a)lists.ipfire.org
> http://lists.ipfire.org/mailman/listinfo/development
> 

-- 
R. W. "Rod" Rodolico
Daily Data, Inc.
POB 140465
Dallas TX 75214-0465
http://www.dailydata.net
214.827.2170


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Re: No Xen development for 3.x any more

[Benjamin Schweikert]

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Hi,
you do not have to change your setup. We are talking about different
things. You are using ipfire as a guest which is alwas possible. Our
Kernel has all needed modules enabled to run as a paravirtualized
kernel.

I was talking about letting ipfire be the VM host. We still have KVM
for this which is much easier to maintain.
Also Dracut, which is used in the version 3.x for generating the
initramdisk, does not need any parts of the xen userspace tools.

Ben


2013/2/8 R. W. Rodolico <rodo(a)dailydata.net>:
> I currently use ipFire under Xen, but this sounds like a whole lot of
> work just for one or two Xen machines. I'm assuming it can simply be
> installed by booting an HVM from the ISO? If not (if there would be
> security holes by doing it), I can simply change to a stand alone.
>
> Thank you very much for all the hard work.
>
> Rod
>
> On 02/07/2013 02:24 PM, Benjamin Schweikert wrote:
>> Hi,
>> after thinking a lot about continuing xen as a hypervisor for ipfire 3.x (and after having talked to micha) I decided to not maintain Xen Hypervisor and Xen Userspace tools any more for now.
>>
>> The reasons for this are:
>> - I will switch from xen to kvm with my systems and so I will not spend a lot of time reading xen mailing lists
>> - The Xen-Sourcecode is not really well "written" and documented
>> - This leads to a big effort in looking for patches because of the hardened system
>> - libvirt is not supported yet
>> - and finally: I don't have the time to spend several evenings bug fixing after each new released xen version.
>>
>> Ben
>> _______________________________________________
>> Development mailing list
>> Development(a)lists.ipfire.org
>> http://lists.ipfire.org/mailman/listinfo/development
>>
>
> --
> R. W. "Rod" Rodolico
> Daily Data, Inc.
> POB 140465
> Dallas TX 75214-0465
> http://www.dailydata.net
> 214.827.2170
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Development mailing list
> Development(a)lists.ipfire.org
> http://lists.ipfire.org/mailman/listinfo/development
>

Aw: Re: No Xen development for 3.x any more

[Jochen Rupp]

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Support for VMWare (ESXi) would be great. I assume you could install IPFire as VM there but are the VMWare-Tools available?

Cheers,
Jochen

-- 
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> Gesendet: Freitag, 08. Februar 2013 um 05:22 Uhr
> Von: "R. W. Rodolico" <rodo(a)dailydata.net>
> An: development(a)lists.ipfire.org
> Betreff: Re: No Xen development for 3.x any more
>
> I currently use ipFire under Xen, but this sounds like a whole lot of
> work just for one or two Xen machines. I'm assuming it can simply be
> installed by booting an HVM from the ISO? If not (if there would be
> security holes by doing it), I can simply change to a stand alone.
>
> Thank you very much for all the hard work.
>
> Rod
>
> On 02/07/2013 02:24 PM, Benjamin Schweikert wrote:
> > Hi,
> > after thinking a lot about continuing xen as a hypervisor for ipfire 3.x (and after having talked to micha) I decided to not maintain Xen Hypervisor and Xen Userspace tools any more for now.
> >
> > The reasons for this are:
> > - I will switch from xen to kvm with my systems and so I will not spend a lot of time reading xen mailing lists
> > - The Xen-Sourcecode is not really well "written" and documented
> > - This leads to a big effort in looking for patches because of the hardened system
> > - libvirt is not supported yet
> > - and finally: I don't have the time to spend several evenings bug fixing after each new released xen version.
> >
> > Ben
> > _______________________________________________
> > Development mailing list
> > Development(a)lists.ipfire.org
> > http://lists.ipfire.org/mailman/listinfo/development
> >
> 
> --
> R. W. "Rod" Rodolico
> Daily Data, Inc.
> POB 140465
> Dallas TX 75214-0465
> http://www.dailydata.net
> 214.827.2170
>
> _______________________________________________
> Development mailing list
> Development(a)lists.ipfire.org
> http://lists.ipfire.org/mailman/listinfo/development
>

Re: Aw: Re: No Xen development for 3.x any more

[Arne Fitzenreiter]

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On Fri, 8 Feb 2013 09:04:08 +0100 (CET), "Jochen Rupp"
<jochen_rupp(a)web.de> wrote:
> Support for VMWare (ESXi) would be great. I assume you could install
> IPFire as VM there but are the VMWare-Tools available?

What has vmware to do with Xen-Hypervisor support?
vmware tools are not free (gpl or bsd) so we cannot add them. 
Only some parts are free and they are already included (openvmtools
addon).

Some words to clarify. We don't drop support to install IPFire as guest
on a xen-host (it is already build into the pae-linux kernel).
Ben will only drop the host support for other xen-guest that was
planned for IPFire 3.x.

Arne

> 
> Cheers,
> Jochen
> 
> -- 
> WorldCommunityGrid.org: Gemeinsam für eine gute Sache!
> Hilf mit, spende Deine ungenutzte PC-Rechenzeit!
> Infos unter: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/
> 
> 
>> Gesendet: Freitag, 08. Februar 2013 um 05:22 Uhr
>> Von: "R. W. Rodolico" <rodo(a)dailydata.net>
>> An: development(a)lists.ipfire.org
>> Betreff: Re: No Xen development for 3.x any more
>>
>> I currently use ipFire under Xen, but this sounds like a whole lot of
>> work just for one or two Xen machines. I'm assuming it can simply be
>> installed by booting an HVM from the ISO? If not (if there would be
>> security holes by doing it), I can simply change to a stand alone.
>>
>> Thank you very much for all the hard work.
>>
>> Rod
>>
>> On 02/07/2013 02:24 PM, Benjamin Schweikert wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> > after thinking a lot about continuing xen as a hypervisor for ipfire 3.x (and after having talked to micha) I decided to not maintain Xen Hypervisor and Xen Userspace tools any more for now.
>> >
>> > The reasons for this are:
>> > - I will switch from xen to kvm with my systems and so I will not spend a lot of time reading xen mailing lists
>> > - The Xen-Sourcecode is not really well "written" and documented
>> > - This leads to a big effort in looking for patches because of the hardened system
>> > - libvirt is not supported yet
>> > - and finally: I don't have the time to spend several evenings bug fixing after each new released xen version.
>> >
>> > Ben
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Development mailing list
>> > Development(a)lists.ipfire.org
>> > http://lists.ipfire.org/mailman/listinfo/development
>> >
>>
>> --
>> R. W. "Rod" Rodolico
>> Daily Data, Inc.
>> POB 140465
>> Dallas TX 75214-0465
>> http://www.dailydata.net
>> 214.827.2170
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Development mailing list
>> Development(a)lists.ipfire.org
>> http://lists.ipfire.org/mailman/listinfo/development
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Development mailing list
> Development(a)lists.ipfire.org
> http://lists.ipfire.org/mailman/listinfo/development

Re: Aw: Re: No Xen development for 3.x any more

[Michael Tremer]

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I am delighted, that we have a nice discussion about the topic!

Basically, this was motivated because we are not doing too much progress
in IPFire 3 right now. Since October, we barely had time to work it and
so we need to cut out things that are not widely used to get IPFire 3
done at some point.

In my (very personal) opinion, Xen is shit. It has ever been and
probably will ever be. Bringing all that into a distribution is
impossible - even the big distributions are struggling with that as Xen
is poorly supported, buggy and nobody takes care about it.

Support for Xen guests (that means IPFire is running as a guest on a Xen
system) comes for free, because finally a lot of the requirements have
been merged into the Linux kernel. We won't have to do anything else on
the user-space level to get this done. No major work at least. Maybe
fighting the bugs...

Running it the other way round (IPFire is the virtualization host and
some virtual machines are running on it) is much more complicated. It's
not that compiling the tools is the main problem, it's rather fighting
the bugs. Xen often breaks things like working with libvirt and stuff
like that, so this is not going to be fun.
Ben volunteered to do this work in IPFire, but together we decided that
the use case for this is not worth doing all that work.

We are happy if there is someone who wants to dig into the problems and
solve them. Frankly, this is a 40 hours a week job. Half of it is doing
the work, the rest is crying because of the things you will find in the
Xen code.

Despite that, we are planning to have KVM, so you can run virtual
machines on a system that comes with the virtualization extensions in
the CPU. KVM is much cleaner, faster and less work from a package
maintainer's point of view.

The essential VMware and Hyper-V kernel modules have been merged into
the Linux kernel a while ago, so running IPFire (2 and 3) on these
hypervisors should be working perfectly.

-Michael