Re: Xen News

[Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost>]

Christoph Egger <Christoph_Egger%gmx.de@localhost> writes:

> Manuel Bouyer wrote:
>> On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 09:28:45AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
>>> Christoph Egger <Christoph_Egger%gmx.de@localhost> writes:
>>>
>>>> XenSource removed the support for powerpc and support for 32bit non-PAE.
>>>>
>>>> Xen 3.3 will come without powerpc support and
>>>> x86 32bit hypervisor with PAE only.
>>> So it seems we should be maintaining 3.2 xenkernel/xentools in pkgsrc
>>> for quite some time, as NetBSD 3 and NetBSD 4 domUs can't handle PAE.
>>
>> And also because some system without the PAE extentions can run Xen
>> just fine.
>
> Can you give some example, please? Those systems without PAE I know
> are i586 class. Xen still requires i686 class.

I think what he meant is that one can run xen on NetBSD 3 and NetBSD 4,
and that these dom0 kernels do not support PAE, even if the hardware has
support.

>> I'd like to keep these supported if it doesn't cost us too
>> much.
>
> The main reason for removing non-PAE support is the fact that 4GB RAM
> are not really much in the virtualization world. Most Xen
> developers/users on xen-devel/xen-users have machines with 8 and 16GB
> RAM.

4GB being not enough RAM for some people is a good reason to have PAE
support, not to remove non-PAE support.  Removing non-PAE support makes
it impossible to run NetBSD as a dom0 with a released version of the
operating system.  So that's really only a good move if the pain of
maintaining non-PAE support is large compared to the benefit of people
being able to experiment with Xen with release kernels.

At work, we are setting up a -current box on amd64 with 8G ram, but I'm
only doing that because we really need a lot of domUs.  My production
server is netbsd-4 and i386 non-PAE with 4GB RAM (3.5 GB usable :-().