[Xen-users] Re: Debian dropping xen support?

[Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 07:35:38PM +0100, Tony Hoyle wrote:
> vanished off the face of the planet.  The old 2.6.18 code is there but 
> as that doesn't support newer motherboards it's no use to me.  I can
> find no official statement but this single line from the kernel 
> maintainer (at http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=418783)
> 
> "2.6.20 is dropped from the archive and no xen support exists in newer
> kernels."  That's it.  No mention of support being 'delayed' or anyting, 
> just no support.

My guess (and it's purely a guess) is that nobody's stepped up to port the
Xen patches to kernels newer than 2.6.20, and hence "no xen support exists
in newer kernels".  Debian is taking a fairly hard-line approach to kernel
versions these days -- no more having hundreds of different kernel versions
and build options in the stable release (at one point, an entire CD's worth
of various kernel packages were in the release).

Now, you get one kernel source that covers all architectures and options,
and the various different kernels get built out of that.  If your pet
out-of-lkml-tree patch doesn't apply to the new kernel source, and nobody's
willing to put the resources into making it work again, then out it goes. 
It's a pest, but the other options were just untenable, from a stable
release maintenance point of view.

In addition to backports, you can also find any old package you like on
snapshot.debian.net.

> That reads to me as if xen is dead on debian.. without kernel support 
> it's pretty useless.  Any ideas why they took this decision?  There's 
> nothing on the debian development archives that I can see.

Package maintainers take decisions as they see fit.  No need for
project-wide consensus (thank $DEITY, or nothing would *ever* get done). You
can easily have a say in what gets done, though -- jump in there and do
things.  If you're feeling motivated, port the Xen patches to 2.6.21.  I'm
quite confident that the kernel maintainers would be happy to re-add the
patch -- it's just that they're not willing to spend some massive amount of
time doing the work themselves (presumably none of them use Xen).

I believe I saw something recently about Fedora forward-porting some Xen
kernel patches... it was either to 2.6.20 or 2.6.21.  If they're working on
2.6.21, you could use their work as a starting point.

> It's left me hosed - I can't build a device driver without headers and 
> they deleted all the xen related 2.6.20 kernel packages without warning, 

Just out of interest, how should you have been warned about this change, to
guarantee that you would know about it in enough time to take whatever
action you deemed appropriate?

As an aside, this discussion would much more productively be had on
pkg-xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, or perhaps
debian-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, rather than here.  You're far more likely to
get the kernel maintainers' and/or Xen package maintainers' input that way.

- Matt

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