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."

KVM is also compatible

[thule]

Plus, KVM has xenner that provides Xen compatible devices to virtual machines. I also saw some patches going into KVM that provide Hyper-V hypercalls to KVM. Right now they are fairly basic, but it is a start.

There is no doubt that KVM is the future. It is built into the kernel -- no dom0 patches required. RedHat is heavily investing in it. Note the sponsored oVirt project that integrates libvirt and FreeIPA to manage a network of virtual machine servers using kerberos and ldap as the security framework.

Re:Where it belongs...

[Anonymous Coward]

f you think hardware visualization is fast, you guys need to revisit what hardware virtualization is and how KVM, Xen, Hyper-V implement it.
Please do not jump to conclusions without knowing the concepts and implementation.
Paravirtualization is faster and a much better approach. Do some benchmarks yourself and you will know. Have some of your VMs run in HVM mode, run benchmarks. Then deactivate HVM and use paravirtualized kernel for the VMs and run the benchmarks again.... you will get pretty conclusive results.

I am talking about Linux on Linux .... I have not done any experiments with Windows on Xen/KVM so not sure.

Now the maintainence part, you are right on.. Xen is a hell to maintain. But we all know speed comes with a compromise.

Can someone explain the point of hypervisors?

[Viol8]

Seems to me they mostly get used to run multiple OS's that each run a single main app. Last time I looked modern OS's are quite capable of running multiple apps at the same time so unless you really need to run different OS's on the same machine (er why?) then what exactly is the point?

Re:KVM is also compatible

[thule]

I'm guessing the only reason KVM was slower was because it didn't have special virtual drivers. It does have block and network drivers now, but NO video drivers. Since KVM is more focused on server performance than graphics I have never had an issue with the graphics speed.