[Pkg-xen-devel] Xen advice requested

[Thomas Goirand]

Paul van der Vlis wrote:
> Do you advice using a 32-bit or a 64-bit Etch dom0?
> 
> Thanks for your advice!
> 
> With regards,
> Paul van der Vlis.

Hi,

I DON'T want to hurt anybody here, so please, pkg-xen-devel team, do not
take what I'm writing here badly, you guys are doing a very hard work,
and I don't think I'd be able to manage it as good as you did.

However, I really think that the Xen kernels from Debian are not so
usable in production, and I think it's best to compile your own. It's
not that hard... If you want to do so, you can follow our howto here:

http://dtcsupport.gplhost.com/DTC-Xen/Upgrade-Your-Kernel-To-Xen

This howto assumes that you know what kernel option to select, and
include a set of patches from Debian that are compatible with the kernel
from the Xen mercurial repo. Note that the Xen kernel from Debian often
delays such patches with no reason (it happened this year with the
splice exploit that was not patched for at least 3 weeks if I remember
correctly).

The current situation is really bad, and I hope this will be solved
soon, it's really a pain that we can't use the latest kernel and have to
stick with 2.6.18. Lucky, with lot's of patches like my howto describes,
it can be used with lot's of ICH9 chipset that are recognized (which is
the biggest problem IMHO). I really hope that it's planned that the
security/kernel team continues support for 2.6.18 until the Xen troubles
are over.

If you are using a Supermicro motherboard (either: PDSMI / PDSMU /
PDSME+), let me know and I'll send you our dom0 .config for doing a
faster setup.

Thomas Goirand