[Oneiric-Topic] Revisit Xen support

[Chuck Short]

On Sat, 02 Apr 2011 08:03:11 -0700
Clint Byrum <clint at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> Excerpts from Michael Zoet's message of Sat Apr 02 01:20:36 -0700
> 2011:
> > 
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> > 
> > Am 02.04.2011 02:05, schrieb Raphaël Pinson:
> > > On Sat, Apr 2, 2011 at 1:51 AM, Clint Byrum <clint at ubuntu.com>
> > > wrote:
> > >> Excerpts from Chuck Short's message of Wed Mar 30 07:27:50 -0700
> > >> 2011:
> > >>
> > >> Just playing devil's advocate here.
> > >>
> > >> Other than people already having familiarity with Xen, what is a
> > >> compelling reason to support it in favor of, or in addition to,
> > >> KVM?
> > >
> > >
> > > Familiarity is a good reason I think, but also industry
> > > standards, and hardware considerations. I think a lot of big
> > > companies expect major distributions such as Ubuntu to provide a
> > > proper support for such a standard as Xen. I know it came as a
> > > disappointment for us that using Lucid as a (production) Xen dom0
> > > was nearly impossible. Also, afair, KVM requires hardware
> > > support. Most recent machines provide it, but it's not rare to
> > > find servers that are too old to use it, and then you'd rather
> > > use Xen for servers than VMWare...
> > >
> > 
> > I agree with that! Really big companies choose the things they know.
> > And if they have to switch the distro they do it.
> > 
> 
> Noted. It sounds like Xen has a lot of inertia.
> 
> > Another advantage for Xen: it is more mature and easier to setup (at
> > least for me because I have only one configuration file I can change
> > with vim). Much more documentation around that works. You have much
> > more network options. And you can easily assign a hardware NIC to a
> > VM with Xen. With KVM this does not work on every hardware... (Now
> > I have 2 15.000,- ? servers where I can not do the things with KVM
> > I could easily do with Xen. This was a pitty experience...)
> > 
> 
> I feel like a broken record, but could you provide us with some facts
> to back up these claims? Bug reports, manual pages, etc.
> 
> 

> I feel like there is a lot of anecdotal evidence, but we shouldn't
> make our decisions just because somebody says KVM can't do this or
> Xen can do that.
> 

http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/.../1742-6596_219_4_042005.pdf

Again Im not saying we should drop KVM in favor of XEN. if it something
our users want then. We should at least have a better solution in
Ubuntu than what we have now.

chuck