[Debian] Re: Possible support for openvz also in the next version of stable

[Ola Lundqvist]

Hi Ben and Pavel

Quoting Ben Hutchings <ben at decadent.org.uk>:
> I thought we had declared both OpenVZ and VServer as deprecated in
> squeeze, but I misremembered - in fact only VServer was deprecated.

That is good news if you ask me.

> Therefore I think we need to make a decision regarding OpenVZ in wheezy,
> fairly soon; then, if we do not reinstate it, we must announce that
> decision.
>
> If OpenVZ is to be included in wheezy, the OpenVZ project and some
> Debian developer must be prepared to support it on a baseline of 3.2.y
> until the end of 2015 (and also support 2.6.32.y until the end of 2013).

I understand. I had a discussion with Pavel on openvz yesterday and he  
told me that they are going to port the changes to 3.4.y version, but  
maybe I can convince them to support it on an earlier release.

> If you cannot do this then it may be that you can serve Debian users
> better by providing your own APT repository and kernel packages.  The
> Debian kernel team can probably provide you some help with setting that
> up.

I agree on that. There are good rhel kernels that I understand can be  
ported to Debian using alien, but I guess that is nothing that would  
be accepted in Debian. I do not even know how well they work on Debian  
in the current state. I have to check that.

> The current status of OpenVZ support for 2.6.32.y is that the git
> repository (git://git.openvz.org/pub/linux-2.6.32-openvz) has not been
> updated for 10 months.  The longterm updates 2.6.32.29 and 2.6.32.47
> included major cfq and scheduler changes that conflicted with OpenVZ;
> these have had to be reverted for Debian's OpenVZ flavour.  All we have
> had in that time is, I think, 5 bugfix patches.

As I understand from openvz they have been a bit too focused on the  
rhel kernels.

Pavel, can you comment on the possibility to provide this support. I'm  
willing to help but I guess I need some support from you as well.

Best regards,

// Ola

> Ben.
>
> On Tue, 2011-11-01 at 23:07 +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 01, 2011 at 09:16:48PM +0100, Ola Lundqvist wrote:
>> > Hi kernel maintainers
>> >
>> > I'm the maintainer of vzctl and vzquota in Debian and would like to bring
>> > openvz kernel support up for discussion. I saw that a few of the  
>> openvz bugs
>> > on the kernel have been closed with the reason that it is no  
>> longer supported
>> > in wheezy. This is fully true and I do not object to the close of  
>> the reports.
>> >
>> > What I would like to bring up for discussion is what would be  
>> required from
>> > the openvz project to get back the support for openvz in the Debian kernel
>> > again for the next stable release.
>> [...]
>>
>> As a necessary (but not sufficient) condition, you and the OpenVZ
>> project would have to support OpenVZ in the *current* Debian stable
>> release.  The last release based on 2.6.32.y was made in March.  For
>> our OpenVZ kernel configurations we had to revert all the scheduler
>> fixes made in 2.6.32.29 due to conflicts which we obviously do not
>> have the necessary knowledge to resolve.
>>
>> It seems to me that the OpenVZ project does not support longterm
>> releases other than RHEL.  That's fine by me, just so long as no-one
>> pretends otherwise.
>>
>> And all the above was previously discussed in
>> <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.kernel/71880/focus=71908>.
>>
>> Ben.
>>
>
> --
> Ben Hutchings
> Horngren's Observation:
>                    Among economists, the real world is often a special case.
>



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