[Xen-devel] Future of xend and xl (Was: Re: [Xen-users] VGA passthough still not working)

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2012-01-25 at 08:26 +0000, Likarpenkov Alexander wrote:
> ÐÐÑÐÐÑÑÐÑÐÑÐ!
> 
> ÐÐ ÐÑÐÑÐÐÐ, ÐÐÐÐÑÐÑÑ ÑÐÑÐÐÑÑÐÐÐ ÑÐÐÐÑÑ 2012 ÐÐÐÐ, Ð 20:41:38 ÐÑ ÐÐÑÐÐÐ:
>  DM> I use the xl toolstack, not xm.  I don't think xm is being actively
>  DM> maintained, at least not for current releases.
> 
> You can in a nutshell what better xl xm?

xm (and the underlying xend daemon) have been effectively unmaintained
since Xen 3.4 or perhaps even earlier (we take band-aids and obvious
fixups but no proper maintenance has been occurring).

In the opinion of the core developers xend is unmaintainable and so we
have chosen to focus our efforts on libxl (a library designed to provide
a common "bottom third" for any Xen toolstack) and the xl toolstack that
is built using it. libxl is also supported by libvirt and there are
plans for xapi (the XCP toolstack) to use it as well.

This was announced in the Xen 4.1 release notes[1] and the upgrade
guide[2]. In Xen 4.2 we have ended up formally deprecating xend rather
than removing it but you should expect that xend will be removed in a
future release of Xen and begin planning your transition to xl (or one
of the other alternative toolstacks), testing the features which matter
to you and reporting bugs/submitting patches as appropriate.

However if someone (or a team of someones) were to step up and begin to
properly maintain xend we would have no objections and would be
supportive of that effort. We would strongly recommend that anyone who
wants to do this considers porting xend to libxl as one of their first
activities. Initial Python bindings for libxl do exist, but in the
absence of a xend port they have not seen significant use.

Ian.

[1] http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/Xen4.1
[2] http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Migration_Guide_To_Xen4.1+


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