[Systems] Buildbot

[Lance Albertson]

Bernie Innocenti wrote:
> Luke S Crawford wrote:
>> KVM would work, though really it's still comparitavely immatture (even though 
>> the linux kernel guys seem to like it more than Xen)   as would Xen
>> in HVM mode.    Both these options would be quite a bit slower than 
>> paravirtualized xen.  I should be learning more about KVM, so maybe I should 
>> dedicate a server to it... but we're still taking about a week or so of lead
>> time.  
>>
>> Do you want to try runing in HVM mode?  I can do that right now
>> without upgrading anything.
>>
>> the other option is to run with the kernel-xen packages from fc9.
> 
> I guess you might make us your guinea pigs on this, as these
> services are not mission critical to us.
> 
> I've been experimenting a little with KVM in F10 and Intrepid, and
> I've also found it fell short from being ready for production.
> More than anything else, libvirtd and virt-maanger seem way too
> immature.  For example, there's an option to freeze a vm to disk,
> but there seems to be no way to restore it afterward ;-)
> 

I've started to use KVM on a few new servers lately at the OSL and I
agree its not nearly as mature as xen. There are a few features that I'd
like to see get better, foremost being live migrations using libvirtd. I
never use the freeze function in xen, so thats not an issue for me.
Another issue I came across is a limitation of 4 virtual CPUs. I think
for basic server virtual machines, its really the future and the way to
go with virtualization. Having a current kernel with KVM built-in is
quite nice (especially if you roll your own kernel). Most distros use a
fairly old kernel with xen since they have to patch it in and be quite a
pain to deal with sometimes.

Overall I haven't had any major issues directly with KVM itself and I've
used it for at least the last six months. I'm running the main OS as
Gentoo so I haven't tried it on other distros as the main machine.

Performance wise, I don't notice any issues between XEN and KVM. They
both appear to be the same.

If you guys need help with KVM, just let me know!

Cheers-

-- 
Lance Albertson                                    lance <at> osuosl.org
Systems Administrator / Architect                        Open Source Lab
Network Services                                 Oregon State University
Work: 541-737-9975                                   PGP Key: 0x27F4B742
GPG Fingerprint       0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1  4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742

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