Re: Raspberry Pi 4 Xen or KVM

[Paul Leiber <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Am 03.08.2023 um 22:59 schrieb reijo.korhonen@xxxxxxxxx:
> Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) is interesting platform to run as server (if your
> succeed to get 8GB version). It uses very little power, so it is
> ecologic solution.
>
> To use Raspberry as VM host, what are pros and cons with traditional
> QEMU/KVM vs Xen? Is it so, that because KVM runs on linux kernel, linux
> guests can use more memory than XEN guests? Or can one or other host be
> installed "Out of the box", but another needs special compiling and
> configuration?
I can't make any statement regarding a comparison between Xen and KVM on 
a Raspberry Pi, as I have no experience using KVM (on any platform).
However, I can say that to get Xen running on a Raspberry Pi 4B (using 
Debian, not Raspbian, and UEFI->Grub bootloader), I needed to build Xen 
myself with ACPI enabled. This was discussed very recently on this list. 
Once I figured out how to build Xen (with help from Julien), 
installation and setup was fairly easy and not really different to a 
installation with a package manager. I needed to manually enable some 
services, but that's the only big difference that I remeber.
If you use U-Boot as a bootloader, you should be able to use the 
standard Xen packages provided by Debian (I didn't try that out myself).
Xen has been running flawlessly on my RPi since installation a couple of 
days ago.
Paul