Re: CentOS 8.x: if your virt stack does not start with Xen you did it wrong

[Pry Mar <pryorm09@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

Significant news has happened since I started this.
https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/

as stated in the Centos blog, the new EOL for C8 is less than 1 year out.
Nevertheless I pushed through and got a Copr build for xen-4.13.2 with
qemu-4.1 and libvirt-5.6.

Copr now alllows disabling modules in the buildroot, so there is a way
to disable the `virt module`, which makes building a xen based virt8
stack impossible.

After doing the Copr build I added the Copr repo into my dom0
repolist, did the install. The dom0 is running as expected.

Copr result packages:
https://copr-be.cloud.fedoraproject.org/results/prymar56/virt8-xen4d/epel-8-x86_64/

Copr repo link:
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/prymar56/virt8-xen4d/repo/epel-8/prymar56-virt8-xen4d-epel-8.repo

The big letdown with libvirt is there is no support for a pv install.
The desired kernel is from elrepo kernel-ml.

cheers,
Prymar56


On 12/2/20, Pry Mar <pryorm09@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello xen-users,
>
> It is one year now after the C8 was released, what is the state of Xen
> dom0 and the Xen based Virt stack?
>
> Of course there is no official support from RH for Xen anymore, but
> there is a rumbling of Xen dom0 support coming from the Virt SIG.
>
> Once its done, it would appear in this tree:
> http://mirrors.oit.uci.edu/centos/8/virt/x86_64/
>
> Here is a short writeup about the xen virt stack I did in April:
> http://lists.ghettoforge.org/pipermail/users/2020-April/000013.html
>
> What are some major changes from Xen builds in C7?
> To build/link EFI in C7 needed a build-requires (BR) on mingw64-binutils.
> However, C8 now includes EFI linking support in the native GNU (ld)
> loader in the
> binutils package - thus one less BR.
>
> C7 had a python package with python2 default.  C8 has no such python
> package, only python2 or python3. It is possible to build and run any
> Xen from xen-4.12+ with python3.
>
> New in C8 is modularity, including the `virt module`, which is
> equivalent to a wrench in the fan, bringing all virt builds based on
> Xen to a screeching halt. As discussed in the GF-Users post this
> obstacle can be overcome.
>
> There is a reason that the Centos Virt SIG has stalled their Xen
> release. As shown there is a limited build in koji without any
> libvirt+ support. I know the whole Xen based stack is possible and how
> it can be done.
>
> cheers,
> PryMar55
>