Xen Dom0, are we making progress?

[Kip Macy]

> I know you were working on Xen support in FreeBSD, but web about it
> (http://www.fsmware.com/xenofreebsd/7.0/STATUS) has one year old info
> (support planned in FreeBSD 6.1). So is there any progress, or Xen will
> not be in any near future release?

Basically Xen did not mature in the fashion that I anticipated. As far
as I can tell it is really only good for server consolidation for
large Linux distro vendors. You need to have what amounts to a private
branch. The xen developers don't appear to understand the importance
of interface versioning. They broke ABI compatibility going from 3.0.2
-> 3.0.3 (trivial to fix, but that is not the point). When last I
worked on it, they had one branch that was in constant flux and
another branch that only received minor bug fixes and was 18 months
behind from a functionality standpoint (think 5.x / 4.x). There are
numerous other logging / supportability issues that I think are only
addressed by the major distros. As it stood 6 months ago, unless you
understood the internals of various bits of the code, there was no way
of diagnosing failures due to a misconfiguration.

This is not to say that it isn't cool technology, but rather that
isn't going to be useful for the things I wanted to use it for so my
time is being directed elsewhere. If I ever have a need for EC2 I may
look at it again.

One of the guys who ported FreeBSD to the xbox has expressed interest
- so something may yet come of it.

I'm happy to provide technical support to an individual who is largely
self-sustaining in working on the code.

                  -Kip