Progress in Fedora 9 Xen pv_ops kernel development

You may recall my announcement of our plans for Fedora 9 Xen kernels. The 5 second summary is that we’re throwing away the current Xen kernels, and writing Xen support on top of paravirt_ops, for both DomU and Dom0, and both i386 & x86_64. Hugely ambitious given the limited time scales involved and the fact that only i386 DomU was working when we started this project.

Just minutes ago, after many many weeks work, Stephen Tweedie reached a very important milestone – the first kernel build capable of fully booting on Dom0, including the IOAPIC & DMA support neccessary to run real hardware drivers – ie the ability to access your real disks once the initrd is done :-)

(10:22:13 AM) sct: It boots
(10:22:14 AM) sct: It runs
(10:22:16 AM) sct: I can ssh into it
(10:22:50 AM) sct: [root@ghost ~]# dmesg|grep para
(10:22:50 AM) sct: Booting paravirtualized kernel on Xen
(10:22:50 AM) sct: [root@ghost ~]#

It is beginning to look like we might actually succeed in our goals in time for Fedora 9 – congrats due to Stephen & the rest of the team working on this !