Xen support without reinventing the wheel

[Eric S. Johansson]

Matthew Palmer wrote:
> I didn't mean it in a "they're your problem, not mine" sense, but more of a
..
> Well, the use of the word 'exchange' in "I was hoping to leverage somebody

my apologies for misunderstanding.  I think we all have days that no 
matter what we write, it tastes like shoe leather.

> Don't diss a solid bug report.  You can get me from "huh?" to "aha!" in 3
> seconds flat with a good bug report.

I don't dismiss the value even if it may have seemed like it was.  I was 
just lamenting how the problems I trip across are so bloody obvious I'm 
wondering why the thing even made it production.  Ask me some time about 
telephones and cell phones.  in the end however I think we're on common 
ground of different colors.  :-)

> I think we've gotten off the track here a bit, at any rate.  I'm interested
> in the larger issues of Xen support in Debian/Ubuntu, but don't have the
> time or inclination to hack on it majorly now.  From the lack of public
> outbursts regarding our discussion, I think there isn't a large pool of
> people just waiting to hack on Xen packaging (unless you've gotten private
> replies to your message), so I guess things will lapse back into the swamp
> until one of us (or someone else) gets sufficiently irritated by it all to
> devote the time to it.

I think there is a fair amount of interest on the xen lists.  but one of 
the problems that all of these virtualization systems have is a degree 
of user unfriendliness.  Far too often the systems are very powerful, 
people think they want to use them but they really don't have any 
reason.  I use one here because it lets me run for different machines on 
one physical piece of hardware.  I'm able to separate my consulting 
server from my personal server from my friends server from the proxy 
server that redirects traffic in all the right directions.  It all just 
works right.

but when it comes right down to it most users don't have a need for this 
kind of capability which by its very nature shrinks the size of the 
community.  I daresay the people that would benefit from this kind of 
capability would be people running servers were the services must be 
partitioned and isolated.  But it's all very very new and not really 
ready for prime time yet.

then there's the issue of setting up DomU images and how soon will we 
see the use of a single disk image with either a classic copy on right 
file system or a union FS typed copy on write file system.  I'm 
personally betting on the union form.

---eric