On Thu, Oct 06, 2011 at 06:48:21PM +1100, Tim Lyth wrote:
The virtualbox email states that I need to ensure I have virtualbox-ose-dkms and the kernel header files installed. I have virtualbox-ose-dkms installed, but somewhere along the way my linux-headers-2.6.32-5-vserver-amd64 package became uninstalled. Instead I have headers for 2.6.37-1, 2.6.37-2, 2.6.38-1, 2.6.38-2, 2.6.39-2 and 3.0.0-1, but none of the corresponding kernel images... Go figure.
So I'm thinking I'll upgrade to a newer kernel, but none of the kernel images mention vserver in their name, nor directly indicate that they support it either.
why not just reinstall the vserver header packages from squeeze? "apt-get install linux-headers-2.6-vserver-amd64" should do it, as long as you have deb entries for squeeze aka "stable" in your /etc/apt/sources.list (and 'apt-get purge' the unwanted header packages for 2.6.37, 2.6.38 etc while you're at it) then you can rebuild your virtualbox-ose modules with dkms.
I am willing to go down the path of rolling my own, and packaging it up with make-kpkg (from kernel-package) so that I don't break apt's idea of what's installed...
according to linux-vserver.org, there's a vs2.3.1-pre10.1 experimental patch suitable for linux 3.0.4 you could try downloading the debianised source for 3.0, applying the patch, and then building the kernel packages (don't forget the headers :) if that doesn't work, get the upstream linux 3.0.4 .tar.gz, apply the patch, and use make-kpkg. if that doesn't work, stick to 2.6.32-5 personally, i think you're making a maintainence nightmare for yourself (especially with vserver not being part of the mainline kernel) and you'd be better off using just ONE virtualisation method - maybe virtualbox since you're already using that for your windows VM. or kvm. perhaps even xen. the management tools for all of them are all converging anyway due to libvirt[1], which can work with all three (and vmware too). [1] http://libvirt.org/ there's no mention of vserver on libvirt.org, but it does support openvz and uml which are similar container-style virtualisation systems for linux.
Therefore, can anyone confirm for me if I upgrade to 2.6.39 or 3.0.0, will I still be able to use my Linux vservers (I really do NOT want to have to rebuild them all within another virtualisation environment)?
sorry, can't confirm that. as mentioned above, there is an experimental patch you can try.
Or has Xen become the defacto (and possibly only) virtualisation system that Debian's pre-packaged kernels will support?
KVM[2] is probably the de-facto standard for linux (incl. debian) these days. It's been included in the mainline kernel since 2.6.20, and most (all?) of the major linux distros have declared that KVM is or is going to be the basis of their virtualisation efforts (e.g. redhat dumped xen for kvm) Xen has only recently entered the mainline kernel....it was always a separate fork before then, which meant you had a choice between recent kernels and xen (i.e. the same sort of problem as you're having with the out-of-mainline vserver). This will probably result in a bit of a revival for xen, as a lot of people JCBF dealing with out-of-tree patches when kvm was already in the kernel. having used kvm (a fair bit), virtualbox (somewhat) and xen (a little), i much prefer kvm. kvm works really nicely with ZFS ZVOLs too - haven't done any performance tests vs LVM, but it flies compared to disk image files on xfs. [2] http://www.linux-kvm.org/ craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #304: routing problems on the neural net