Fedora Xen PPC integration report 2/20

Fedora Xen PPC integration report 2/20

[Jerone Young]

I'll go through some of what is going on. Our break down of packages can
be found here:
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenPPC/Fedora?highlight=%28Fedora%29

Fedora Community (PPC)
=====================
IRC -- best place
~~~
server: irc.feenode.net (freenode)
channel: #fedora-ppc

Mailing List
~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ppc
This list is not very active


Fedora Core 7
=============
Currently PPC rawhide builds of Fedora core 7 have a lot of know issues
(as I found out in IRC). Apparently there is a lot of work happening to
the builds at the moment so FC7test3 MAY be a reliable build for PPC.
Due to these problems I have been unable to create an environment to get
Xen up and going under FC7 to see what may/may not be wrong with
userspace tools. I am prodding people now!

One sticking point that noone seems to be able to answer yet. Is does
Fedora work on IBM System P systems. It looks to work for System I, but 

Feature freeze
--------------
Has been moved back to March 19

Release date
------------
The release date has been moved to May 24th. They are going to attempt
to rework the build system so the Fedora Core & Fedora Extras are
combined to form Voltron!
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/7/Schedule

kernel
-------
So options CONFIG_PPC_MULTIPLATFORM (Jimi you called it
CONFIG_PPC_GENERIC) is enabled. Which will allow for kernel integration.

The Fedora PPC kernel maintainer is David Woodhouse
<dwmw2@infradead.org>

He is more then happy to take in need changes if we can get them in and
they don't break anything.


Installer (anaconda)
--------------------
The installer is unable to create  "Prep" partitions which are used by
IBM PPC machines to load up the boot loader (as opposed to the Master
Boot Record everyone else uses). I've filed a bug on this:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=229231


IBM PPC Systems
---------------
While it's supposed to work. I have yet to see this work with Global
Firmware.  


Fedora 7 Extras
===============
grub2
------
In this space I started the prep work by packaging up grub2 for
fedora-extras with fixes as suggested by Jermy Katz. The problem is no
one has gotten to it. I have emailed the list today probing to see if
someone would hurry up and review it and throw it in. The bugzilla for
the review can be found here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=228255


More info as it comes but this is where things stand as of today. 

Re: Fedora Xen PPC integration report 2/20

[Jerone Young]

Sorry about this guys sent this to the wrong list by accident. But
please do enjoy ;-).

On Tue, 2007-02-20 at 15:58 -0600, Jerone Young wrote:
> I'll go through some of what is going on. Our break down of packages can
> be found here:
> http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenPPC/Fedora?highlight=%28Fedora%29
> 
> Fedora Community (PPC)
> =====================
> IRC -- best place
> ~~~
> server: irc.feenode.net (freenode)
> channel: #fedora-ppc
> 
> Mailing List
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~
> http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ppc
> This list is not very active
> 
> 
> Fedora Core 7
> =============
> Currently PPC rawhide builds of Fedora core 7 have a lot of know issues
> (as I found out in IRC). Apparently there is a lot of work happening to
> the builds at the moment so FC7test3 MAY be a reliable build for PPC.
> Due to these problems I have been unable to create an environment to get
> Xen up and going under FC7 to see what may/may not be wrong with
> userspace tools. I am prodding people now!
> 
> One sticking point that noone seems to be able to answer yet. Is does
> Fedora work on IBM System P systems. It looks to work for System I, but 
> 
> Feature freeze
> --------------
> Has been moved back to March 19
> 
> Release date
> ------------
> The release date has been moved to May 24th. They are going to attempt
> to rework the build system so the Fedora Core & Fedora Extras are
> combined to form Voltron!
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/7/Schedule
> 
> kernel
> -------
> So options CONFIG_PPC_MULTIPLATFORM (Jimi you called it
> CONFIG_PPC_GENERIC) is enabled. Which will allow for kernel integration.
> 
> The Fedora PPC kernel maintainer is David Woodhouse
> <dwmw2@infradead.org>
> 
> He is more then happy to take in need changes if we can get them in and
> they don't break anything.
> 
> 
> Installer (anaconda)
> --------------------
> The installer is unable to create  "Prep" partitions which are used by
> IBM PPC machines to load up the boot loader (as opposed to the Master
> Boot Record everyone else uses). I've filed a bug on this:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=229231
> 
> 
> IBM PPC Systems
> ---------------
> While it's supposed to work. I have yet to see this work with Global
> Firmware.  
> 
> 
> Fedora 7 Extras
> ===============
> grub2
> ------
> In this space I started the prep work by packaging up grub2 for
> fedora-extras with fixes as suggested by Jermy Katz. The problem is no
> one has gotten to it. I have emailed the list today probing to see if
> someone would hurry up and review it and throw it in. The bugzilla for
> the review can be found here:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=228255
> 
> 
> More info as it comes but this is where things stand as of today. 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-devel mailing list
> Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com
> http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel

Re: Fedora Xen PPC integration report 2/20

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 03:58:06PM -0600, Jerone Young wrote:
> I'll go through some of what is going on. Our break down of packages can
> be found here:
> http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenPPC/Fedora?highlight=%28Fedora%29
> 
> Fedora Community (PPC)
> =====================
> IRC -- best place
> ~~~
> server: irc.feenode.net (freenode)
> channel: #fedora-ppc

Neither of these places have any of the Fedora Xen maintainers present.
If you want to get PPC Xen support into Fedora you'll need to make sure
to have discussions / post plans to the public fedora-xen mailing list
so that the Xen team can get involved.

  http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-xen/

I'm happy to include any patches neccessary for the Xen userspace, libvirt,
virt-manager/virt-install tools, etc, since I doubt there will be many
changes needed to support PPC. By far the biggest task will be getting
a PPC Xen kernel tree sync'd up with the latest LKML tree used in Fedora 7.

NB, at this time plan is still for Fedora 7 to ship Xen 3.0.4, simply 
because, even if it is released in time, we don't expect to have time to 
rebase Xen 3.0.5 to new LKML tree before Fedora 7 feature freeze.

> kernel
> -------
> So options CONFIG_PPC_MULTIPLATFORM (Jimi you called it
> CONFIG_PPC_GENERIC) is enabled. Which will allow for kernel integration.
> 
> The Fedora PPC kernel maintainer is David Woodhouse
> <dwmw2@infradead.org>
> 
> He is more then happy to take in need changes if we can get them in and
> they don't break anything.

David maintains the PPC *baremetal*  kernels - the Xen kernels are 
maintained separately by the Fedora Xen team - in particular Juan
Quintela[1] who leads the effort to forward port trees from xen-unstable
onto the more recent LKML trees that are distributed in Fedora. You'll
have to sync up with Juan to figure out feasibility of getting PPC support
into his kernel-xen trees. 

Regards,
Dan.

[1] Juan Quintela <quintela@redhat.com>
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