Re: [Xen-users] Why did RHEL drop Xen support?

[Lars Kurth <lars.kurth@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I can't speak for RedHat, but the reasons at the time appeared to have been mainly technical, with the main reason being the fact that Xen support was not upstreamed into the Linux Kernel at the time (hardware, porting costs, etc. all follow from this). Whether the size of codebase was a reason is actually debatable: it depends on how you define KVM and Xen and measure size (e.g. do the Xen codebase contains testcode and toolstacks, the KVM codebase doesn't - KVM user components depend heavily on QEMU, which is quite a sizeable codebase - etc.). Of course since then, RedHat has heavily invested in KVM. The primary technical reasons why RedHat may have done this, by now have gone away.

Besides building Xen from source, increasing momentum to bring Xen back into the RedHat world is actually pioneered by a number of Xen and CentOS community members. For example, see https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/xen_centos6/ ... I will leave things at this, as I don't want to take away their thunder in the coming weeks when this project starts to become more public. I would expect that there also will be follow-up projects for CentOS 7, etc.

Lars

On 29/01/2013 09:29, tech mailinglists wrote:

I think they don't will do this. But let's define what is meant when we say they don't support Xen. From the view of Red Hat they simply don't package Xen and don't have Xen kernels in there repository.

But you should be able to simply build Xen and a Dom0/DomU ready kernel on a Red Hat System. So if you have actual Red Hat Systems I think they are on kernel 2.6.X you will need to patch the kernel to get Dom0 support if there are patches available for this version. You also could take a kernel from kernel.org and compile it with Xen support. If the kernel is 3.2+ everything should be in the kernel out of the box so you could rebuild the source packages.

Xen simply can be built from the tarball which can be found at xen.org. Everything should work well with that.

Best Regards

2013/1/29 linbao <girl111_2002@xxxxxxxxxxx>

i wanna know that will redhat get xen back on rhel7????

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Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2013 10:14:35 +0100
From: mailinglists.tech@xxxxxxxxx
To: bailey.alex@xxxxxxxx
CC: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] Why did RHEL drop Xen support?

Hello Alex,

Red Hat dropped the Xen support because of the fact that they are support primary KVM. They are doing this because of a few facts:

1. The most of development on virtualization Red Hat is doing on KVM

2. The design of KVM requires hardware support but is much easier as the design of Xen

3. The code base is much smaller I think.

4. KVM was very early merged to mainline kernel, Xen now also is merged to mainline kernel but in the time where Red Hat dropped Xen only KVM was in mainline kernel.

These are facts were some discussion can be done but I think they are comprehendable.

Best Regards

2013/1/29 Alex Bailey <bailey.alex@xxxxxxxx>

Hey Guys,

just wondering why RHEL dropped support for Xen, does anyone know why or where to find some good answers?

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