Re: [Xen-users] Open source waits for a Xen moment in 2006

[Henning Sprang <henning_sprang@xxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2006-01-19 at 21:30 -0500, Costa, Jeff wrote:
> Interesting article that talks about this community of Xen
> early-adopters:
> http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid39_gci1159889,00.html
> 

I just flew over it. I think there's some important and correct
information.

There's no doubt that the people making xen do a great job and make a
good software. Thank you very much!

But, to give some hint about what can and should be done better so more
people can adopt it, and probably one day also people not into
kernel-compiling, c-programming and very low-level system stuff can use
xen without killing themselves:

As for usability, and the ease of getting started, xen has a long way to
go when compared to it's "cousins" like vmware, qemu, and probably the
others which I didn't try yet.

I just got into it, and I know how to compile a kernel to get the one or
other feature, and I have a good basic knowledge of the important
network and system setup stuff involved - still it took me much longer
to get started with xen than I imagined. 

Here some details of what I think should be made easier/fixed if the
goal is to reach more people, and give them a real easy start with xen:

1) The default kernels are not very well suited for everything I need -
they have hardware drivers for everything but the kitchen sink, so the
compile takes ages, but they miss basic ip stuff (one example: nfsroot
and ip dhcp pnp config from which the nfsroot location could be get
cannot be found in the same -xen or -xenU kernel by default together).

2) There are some issues and things which are not well documented yet,
or just don't work with some hardware, while it's not defined which
hardware has no issues( see my repost an hour ago with acpi issues )and
which one has issues. This makes buying hardware for xen an adventure -
which private people cannot afford financially, business people just
loose their job betting on something which doesn't work with the new
hardware they bought for it.

3) The fact that there are multiple different tutorials for the same
stuff doesn't make it easier, it just made the choice harder after which
tutorial I should go - and most of them don't say for which version of
xen they are written.
There are also some unclear things in some documentation - in some
places it's said one should use the *-xen kernel, in some other places
it's said the *-xenU kernel should be used, this information isn't
constsistent. 
Another example of misleading documentation:

In the README it's said to compile and install xen like that:
    # make KERNELS=linux-2.6-xen world
    # make install

Which doesn't work for obviuous reasons, when you got deeper into it,
you know it must either be 

make world
make install
or 
make KERNELS=linux-2.6-xen world
make KERNELS=linux-2.6-xen install

That sounds cheap, but, believe me, for somebody starting with new
software it makes adopting xen difficult and feeling of working with
flaky, unstable stuff.

4) Apropos unstable - also unclear, is xen 3.0.0 stable or not? If it's
stable, why do the distributions packages unpack in xen-unstable?
Also sounds small, but for new people it doesn't make a good feeling.
Would you feel well in a new car with a sticker on it "this is an
unstable crash.test car", even after you made it run 150 miles without
crashing it? There'd be always that insecure feeling.

If there's some interest I can make a more detailed list of where I saw
some errors, I tell them now just by memory of what I saw in the last
two weeks.

I'd be glad if the xen developers see this message as helpful to improve
their software and not as negative criticism.

Henning
> 
> ______________________________________________________________________



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