Xen Development Tree (Linux Version) Update
The Xen Community has completed a discussion around the selection of the proper tree for future development activities;
from Keir Fraser on June 4th (full thread)…
With 3.4 out the door it is time to revisit the state of our Linux repositories. Currently we have a number of trees in various states of maintenance: – linux-2.6.18-xen.hg: the ‘original’ tree. Still maintained, used and tested but increasingly long in the tooth. – ext/linux-2.6.27-xen.hg: a snapshot of opensuse’s kernel port. This clones tree is not maintained or tested. – XCI/linux-2.6.27.git: a forward port of the Xen patches to 2.6.27. Maintained as part of XCI project. – Jeremy’s pv_ops patches against kernel.org: maintained, (somewhat) tested, but incomplete.
It is probably time to kill the 2.6.18 tree, or at least stop active development within it. It is increasingly a kludged collection of backports of more recent kernel patches, and is also missing a lot of drivers for more modern hardware.
Our proposal is to move XCI’s linux-2.6.27 tree out of the XCI subproject and make it the main user tree. Development and automated testing would occur on that tree and of course on Jeremy’s pv_ops patchset (which we want to completely move onto at some point in the future).
The community has decided to move all development to “Jeremy’s pv_ops tree” as the new platform. Jeremy’s tree contains the 2.6.29 Linux kernel with associated patches and will end the Xen’s use of 2.6.18 on all future releases. The tree switch is anticipated to be complete by the middle of next week and I will post the information on this blog.
As I posted late last week, Xen is still engaged with the kernel.org team to move pv_ops Dom0 into upstream.