8.10 Ibex does not support Xen - the package description fails to mention

[Mikko Ohtamaa]

Ubuntu 8.10 Interpid Ibex provide a Xen server package:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/i386/ubuntu-xen-server

However, Xen kernels are not provided and getting one seem to be pretty impossible:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=950636

The users (me) might think that Xen is supported because this package is provided. They might spent few hours to think how to enable Xen kernel support which is not possible. To avoid possible frustration caused by this it should be clearly stated that *Interpid does not support Xen hosts*.

[Guy Thouret (guy-thouret)]

I am a big Ubuntu advocate and when I needed to prepare two Xen virtual machine hosts, I naturally saw the packages were available and assumed Xen was supported. Only after I installed Ubuntu Server on both machines did I find there were no Xen kernel images provided.

It is very disappointing to discover that the decision was made not to support Xen while Canonical are trying to push with the server product and virtualisation is becoming ever popular.

I am now running openSuSE on these servers as an alternative due to the lack of Xen support.

[Wido den Hollander (wido)]

The main reason (what i have heard) is that there were no Xen patches available for the 2.6.27 kernel, so dom0 support in the kernel was not possible.

Since Xen is still shipping out 2.6.18 the Ubuntu teams have to re-engineer all the Xen patches for a new kernel version.

So it is not really Ubuntu to blame. And btw, why won't you use 8.04?