[Xen-API] Re: [Xen-devel] Building XCP Debian packages: what sources or repo to use?

[Zheng Li <dev@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi Thomas,

I think George Shuklin has made it quite clear in the other thread: 
XenServer(XCP) was designed and implemented as yet another integrated Linux 
distribution (variant) from the beginning rather than independent software 
packages. XAPI itself is not difficult to port to another distribution, but all 
the rest it depends on (drivers, system scripts, system conventions, dependency 
packages, packing conventions etc.) are not going to get ported in just one go.

On 04/05/2011 17:45, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> I'm currently only interested in having the needed bits so that
> Openstack can run with Xen, which I prefer over KVM. I've been told by
> the people from RackSpace, that Openstack uses XCP for Xen. I'm not
> interested to run CentOS at all (I'm a Debian Developer and work
> exclusively with Debian), so my only option was to build the needed
> things Openstack is using from XCP so that they run in Debian. I'm sure
> other operating systems would have benefit from this work too.
I can appreciate the benefits of being able to just "apt-get" XCP in as many 
distributions as possible, but I don't quite understand how this would bother openstack 
fellows. To my understanding, openstack use various virtualization platforms as appliance 
(like canned box) as far as these platforms provide API for openstack to control from 
outside and to implement its own primitives on top.  For XCP, the API call can be made 
via XML-RPC, xe command, or maybe ssh + standard bash if you really want to do some 
customization, none of them is related to the distribution used inside this appliance.

The only explanation I have in mind is someone might want to use his daily OS 
as XCP Dom0 (or use a XCP dom0 as his daily OS), rather than control a XCP 
server from remote. But this is generally a bad idea for common XCP users, 
since using Dom0 as desktop-like would hurt the server's suitabilities. Such a 
solution would only benefit those who need to developing XCP itself, so that 
they don't have to switch to a different environment to do development. If this 
is what you want, you can possibly set up a XCP development environment on 
debian with the following:

- xen-unstable.hg and qemu-xen-unstable.hg from xen.org
- xen-deb-pkg (https://github.com/zli/xen-deb-pkg), which is a patched version 
of the standard xen debian packages' control files with some extra patches from 
XCP

Using these two to build a customized version of Xen packages, then get 
xen-api-libs.git and xen-api.git from https://github.com/xen-org and compile 
them one after another. You'll surely need ocaml-3.12 debian package installed 
in your system and some other dependency. Unfortunately I didn't have a list 
for all of these dependencies (e.g. lib-devmapper-dev and lvm etc.). But it's 
pretty easy to figure out when you bump into some error complaining some 
components are missing, and it's for sure that you don't need extra packages 
outside debian to get XAPI compiled. However this will only give you a 
development environment not a running environment since the scripts and various 
other settings XAPI depends on have not been ported into your environment. I 
usually develop in such an environment, and upload the compiled XAPI binary to 
a real XCP installation to test.

PS. If the compilation of XAPI still gets problems, have a look at the xcp/lite 
branch of the both repositories under my github account 
(https://github.com/zli/xen-api). I once did some Makefile cleanup to XAPI, but 
that's mainly for controlling XAPI with OCaml toplevel, and I'm not sure 
whether it's essential.

Cheers
Zheng



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