[Pkg-xen-devel] Xen (dom0) Kernels in Lenny

[Pasi Kärkkäinen]

On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 08:11:52PM +0000, Giles Westwood wrote:
> Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 03:11:16PM +0000, Henning Sprang wrote:
> >> On Mon, 2008-02-04 at 15:47 +0200, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> >>> [...]
> >>> Basicly it looks like the latest well working Xen-kernel patches are for 
> >>> 2.6.18 kernel (included with xen.org releases) and shipped with rhel5/centos5
> >>> and debian etch 4.0.
> >> Hmm, I know that's right for Debian, but IIRC the version of Xen Kernels
> >> in Fedora 8 is .21 - and I believe to remember, they have different
> >> versions there for the normal Kernel (it was the latest available at
> >> that time, .22 I guess) and the Xen kernels.
> >>
> > 
> > Yes, there's a later Xen kernel on Fedora 8, but IIRC there has been more
> > problems (and less testing) with it than with 2.6.18 based ones..
> 
> My only reason for trying out an ubuntu cross-compiled dom0 kernel of 2.6.22 was
> because the 2.6.18 kernel that came with debian didn't have new gigabit broadcom
> network drivers that xen needed. I'm testing centos5 now to see what their support
> is like as far as I remember Redhat older kernels they back compile some features. 
> 

Yep, RHEL5 / CentOS5 kernels have a lot of patches and (driver) backports
from newer kernels. 

> >>> RedHat guys are working to get all the (missing) Xen features ported to
> >>> vanilla/Linus (kernel.org) kernel and submitted and integrated upstream.
> >>>
> 
> How does this differ from the 2.6.22 forward patching that was done previously?
> 

Forward ported Xen patches (from 2.6.18 to 2.6.22) wont make it to the
vanilla kernel.org/Linus kernel, because they're not based on pv_ops. 

Maintaining that forward port is a pain, and noone wants to do it. 

That's why a proper patchset needs to be developed and submitted/merged upstream
to vanilla kernel.org kernel. 

-- Pasi