Work Underway To Return Xen Support To Fedora 13

Julie188 writes "Details on this are admittedly sketchy, but both Red Hat and Xen.org have gone on record promising that some kind of support for the Xen hypervisor is forthcoming for Fedora users. As we know, on Monday, Fedora 13 was released, chock full of features to appeal to business users. One of the ballyhooed improvements to 13 is virtualization — meaning KVM and only KVM — for Red Hat. Xen was dropped from Fedora a few releases ago and it hasn't come back in 13, except that 13 still supports Xen guests. Meanwhile, 'work is underway in Xen.org to add platform support to Fedora 13 post-release,' promises Xen.org's Ian Pratt."

Comments

Where it belongs...

[Chris Snook]

Fedora, not RHEL, is really where Xen belongs anyway. It's exactly the sort of mix of neat ideas, dirty hacks, and blatant wheel re-invention that could only have come from academia, and it was only ever made enterprise-grade by throwing heaps of money at it, and even then only for carefully tested configurations. Yes, it's pretty much single-handedly responsible for commoditizing virtualization, but the combination of the design and the lack of cooperation with the kernel community made it a nightmare to support. Xen is responsible for the existence of KVM because it showed such immense promise, and then delivered extreme frustration and pain.

Since Xen decided long ago it was going to be the center of its own universe, it's really in a great position to do cool experimental things that the kernel community would be more cautious about and the enterprise market wouldn't touch with a 10' pole without seeing a strong proof of concept first. That kind of innovation is a stated goal of the Fedora project.

The only technical advantage Xen enjoys right now is a lack of dependency on hardware virtualization features. Since it's impossible to buy a new machine that you can call a server with a straight face that lacks hardware virtualization, this is meaningless in the enterprise world, but Fedora (like other community distros) has a much broader scope, so there's still a real chance there for necessity to give birth to more invention, much like it did in the early days of Xen when x86 hardware virtualization was still a whisper in the halls at Intel and AMD.

Of course, Xensource/Citrix has already driven away most of the community that would have done this kind of pre-product development, so I'm not holding my breath, but it would be nice to see something more to come of all that work (and years of my own life) beyond simply supporting existing users.