Announcing Project Kronos: XenAPI on Debian and Ubuntu

[Mike McClurg <mike.mcclurg@citrix.com>]

Hi Xen users,

The XCP team would like to formally announce Project Kronos, our port of
XCP's XenAPI toolstack to Debian and Ubuntu dom0. This will give users
the ability to install Debian or Ubuntu, and then just do 'apt-get xapi'
in order to build a system that is (roughly) functionally equivalent to
a standard XCP distribution.

This project provides a number of benefits. First of all, it will
provide Xen users with the option of using the same API and toolstack
that XCP and XenServer provide. It will give early adopters the chance
to try out new changes to the XenAPI before they get released in new XCP
and XenServer versions. And because we've ported all of our toolstack to
build on Debian, it's now much, much easier to build our tools outside
of an SDK VM.

Our general roadmap for this project (and XCP in general) can be found here:

http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/XCP_Roadmap

Instructions for install the XenAPI toolstack on Debian can be found here:

http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/XAPI_on_debian

A list of project milestones, deliverables for each milestone, and
individual work items for the project can be found on this Google Docs
spreadsheet:

http://goo.gl/jX3Kc

For building the toolstack from source, Jon Ludlam has an autobuilder
repository on github here:

https://github.com/jonludlam/xapi-autobuilder

To use it, just clone the repository and type make. This will pull in
all the dependency repositories and build them using pbuilder. If you
want to build individual packages, dig into the build scripts a bit to
see what's going on -- hopefully we'll have a little better
documentation soon.

Please follow the instructions and play along! This is very much a work
in progress, and things are expected to change rapidly. We don't expect
everything to work properly yet, but we think it's ready enough to at
least share our progress. If you do decide to test this out, please
report any bugs you find or problems you encounter to the xen-api
mailing list, with the subject line "Xapi on Debian: <blah>". There are
also XCP contributors lurking on #xen-api on freenode who may be able to
answer questions about build or install problems.

Thanks to everyone who's helped out with this project, and to everyone
who is about to give it a try. Happy hacking!

Mike