Re: drop xen4.8 ?

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

"Mathew, Cherry" <c%bow.st@localhost> writes:

> I'm curious to know a user PoV of our Xen support vs. native nvmm
> support.

I have only run Xen where the box basically runs a dom0 with not much
happening in order to support a number of domUs.  On these I do not run
an X server.  I realize that's perhaps the normal case, but also not the
only case.

> For me, the current win for Xen is:
> - supports older hardware (my dual core laptop x200 series)
> - mem ballooning
> - acpi sleep (with linux dom0 and NetBSD PV)

Agreed on hardware; nvmm seems very interesting, but I don't have the
impression it will run on CPUs from 2006.

Also, you left out "runs as a dom0 using released versions of NetBSD,
and has a many-year track record of being stable".  I've been using Xen
with NetBSD dom0 since 2005. 

> The no win is:
> - no gui (no drm) (partly my fault)
> - no dom0 SMP (partly my fault)
> - no acpi sleep (not nvmm's fault - native support is broken).

Agreed, but doesn't bother me.  I would really like to see Someone fix
the dom0 SMP issues, even if it means biglocking the xen bits for
starters.

The other thing that I wonder about is how it works with nvmm to say run
6 guests and have them all start up automatically at boot, like you get
with xendomains= with Xen.  Surely that must be doable, but I don't know
how easy/normal it is.  It seems that with things like virtualbox there
is a notion of a gui app on a display with a human and a mouse, and my
impression is that nvmm avoids that either mostly or entirely.