-----Original Message----- From: Jan Beulich [mailto:JBeulich@suse.com] Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2014 09:06 To: Davy Kager Cc: opensuse-kernel@opensuse.org; Jeff Mahoney Subject: RE: [opensuse-kernel] Modularize PS/2 driver for Xen/EC2
On 23.04.14 at 21:48, <mail@davykager.nl> wrote: How does kernel-ec2 compare to kernel-xen on the guest-side of things? The EC2 kernel is a lot sleeker, but I feel weird running it on a non-EC2 provider. A kernel-xen just for guests would be great. ;)
There's nothing EC2-specific in them, they solely exist because of the compatibility need with much older hypervisors. Since Amazon confirmed that on those old hypervisors no device pass-through would ever be done, we took the opportunity of having this separate config to (try to) strip off all drivers for "real" hardware devices. Hence for a DomU without device pass- through, this flavor should be quite fine even outside of EC2. But (I hope you understood this already) the flavor is _not_ suitable for use in Dom0 (along with "real" hardware driver support, the capability to run in the privileged Dom0 mode got disabled too, as also guaranteed to never be needed in EC2 instances).
Jan
Thanks for all the information! My openSUSE installation is running on Linode, which seems very similar to EC2. Should be all virtual kit, kernel is loaded through pv-grub. Only thing that might be "real" is the CPU (because of warnings below). My reasons for choosing kernel-xen are that a) It "finds" more RAM than vanilla. b) It runs smoothly without further tweaking. c) It gives me proper timestamps in dmesg. I just installed kernel-ec2-3.14.1-24 to see how it would do. There are some warnings on mkinitrd: modprobe: FATAL: Module thermal not found. WARNING: no dependencies for kernel module 'thermal' found. modprobe: FATAL: Module processor not found. WARNING: no dependencies for kernel module 'processor' found. modprobe: FATAL: Module fan not found. WARNING: no dependencies for kernel module 'fan' found. Are these predefined somewhere? My virtual box definitely doesn't have access to the system's thermals. ;) Upon reboot I get the expected dmesg output related to this thread: [ 1.204265] i8042: No controller found [ 1.204394] mousedev: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice My observations so far: * kernel-ec2 is doing very well inspite of the warnings mentioned above. * `free' shows me about 1 MiB less RAM than kernel-xen did. * HUGE space saver! From 175 MB to 40 MB. I'm liking it. * Seems to boot just like kernel-xen. Are (all) Xen DomU-specific patches in this kernel? As I wrote kernel-xen was one of the reasons for me to stick with SUSE. If possible I'd like to stick with kernel-ec2, especially if the PS/2 bits are taken out, and assuming I don't lose any of the Xen hotness that the mighty big kernel-xen brings. It's a much more economic solution space-wise. Thanks, Davy -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+owner@opensuse.org