Comments on: debian kernel, firmware and virtualisation

By: Sam

Sam — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:16:34 +0000

I really hope xen stays with it. I just moved half my network onto a xen box. Is debian really stopping support or is xen just getting moved into the kernel so debian won’t have to do support for it?

By: -dsr-

-dsr- — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:11:54 +0000

My company is deploying KVM on Debian in production. It works well, is highly manageable, and can be added or subtracted as needed without doing a kernel change. That’s a lot of usefulness.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:11:32 +0000

@Steve: You might consider just registering hosting.coop and using that, rather than ${TECH}-hosting.{com,net,org}

@MJ: The current Debian kernel, as far as I know, has finished splitting out all the known firmware in the kernel, the kernel team constantly works to push these patches upstream (with good success).

By: Simon McVittie

Simon McVittie — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:43:48 +0000

I second the recommendation for KVM. It’s in-tree and seems to work fine; at Collabora we’ve migrated our production servers from Xen to KVM.

Also, because the KVM hypervisor is just a normal Linux installation with “bare metal” access to the hardware, it’s suitable for use on a laptop – the host system can suspend/hibernate/resume, use 3D acceleration, etc., unlike a Xen dom0. Many of us use KVM on our laptops to run Scratchbox 1 (either to run an i386 Scratchbox on amd64 hardware, or just to keep Scratchbox 1 and its requirement to adjust potentially-security-sensitive VM settings away from our real systems).

By: Michael Renzmann

Michael Renzmann — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:21:50 +0000

So far I’ve used the stuff from linux-vserver.org on several servers (among them that of the MadWifi project), in the form of the appropriately patched kernel shipped by Debian.

Now that the support for this stuff will be marked “deprecated” in Debian 6, I’m currently investigating OpenVZ and. As far as I can tell at this point, I’ll migrate from VServer to OpenVZ soon on my personal server, and once I have some more experience with OpenVZ the others most probably will also be migrated.

By: Steve Kemp

Steve Kemp — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:51:25 +0000

Personally I’m planning on moving from Xen to KVM.

Xen seems to have lost out, as predicted, due to its chronic failure to be included in the Kernel sources. Now it seems that other systems are taking over.

On the whole I think virtualisation is basically a commodity these days, there are lots of choices from vserver, through kvm, to vmware.

Anyway xen-hosting.org will become kvm-hosting.org sometime around December if I get organised enough.

By: MJ Ray (mjray) 's status on Monday, 26-Oct-09 07:49:45 UTC - Identi.ca

MJ Ray (mjray) 's status on Monday, 26-Oct-09 07:49:45 UTC - Identi.ca — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:49:55 +0000

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