The debian GNU/Linux kernel’s firmware content is one of the most troubling bugs, and (as I understand it):
- it mostly came from upstream (so fixing it only in debian isn’t sustainable),
- it’s something some FSF supporters kick us for (often while ignoring other not-aiming-for-100%-free systems and turning a blind eye to the non-program problem in their own back yard) and
- it’s actually pretty hard to fix and even harder to get paid for fixing.
The latest Bits from the kernel team included: “A constructive discussion was held about the outstanding firmware issues, how the team addresses them and how we might work with upstream to address our DSFG issues with kernel sources.”
The fuller minutes expand it a little: “The main topic was concerned with continued splitting of non free firmware and ensuring Debian kernels remain useful even with our DSFG challenges. Discussion about upstream firmware releases and general agreement was reached to talk to Dave Woodhouse about this (as he did most of the upstream firmware splits) . Action item for Vince and Max to talk to Dave Woodhouse.”
Good luck and thanks for working on this!
Another interesting point for our co-op is that xen dom 0 patches “will be included in the squeeze kernel release subject to ongoing stabilisation work. The feature will be marked as deprecated and will not appear in future releases.” vserver (which I still use on one server) is also going away, but that’s less of a surprise.
It appears that OpenVZ is the only one with continuing support in the debian kernel, so I guess I’d better take another look at it (after it failed messily last time I tried).
Will you be changing your virtualisation approach? Do you think debian will get any encouragement for its firmware-splitting, or more flaming for not going far enough?
[…] Published debian kernel, firmware and virtualisation http://www.news.software.coop/debian-kernel-firmware-and-virtualisation/803/ […]
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.
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.
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).
@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).
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.
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?