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Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:37:36 -0800
From: Andrew Sharp <andy.sharp@lsi.com>
To: "Edge, Bruce" <Bruce.Edge@lsi.com>
Cc: "Nichols, Chuck" <Chuck.Nichols@lsi.com>, "Banerjee, Arindam"
 <Arindam.Banerjee@lsi.com>, "Sangapu, Satish" <Satish.Sangapu@lsi.com>,
 "McNeal, Rick" <Rick.McNeal@lsi.com>
Subject: Re: VM distribution selection
Message-ID: <20100118143736.58ace7f6@ripper.onstor.net>
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On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:05:08 -0700 "Edge, Bruce" <Bruce.Edge@lsi.com>
wrote:

> I know we previously agreed on the 2.6.31 kernel as a target for the
> linux VMs. Orion also selected the Debian 5.0 release as their target
> OS. There have been some recent developments which make the Ubuntu
> 10.4 release (due 04/2010) an attractive target for a VM base OS, as
> well as for dom0 for the DPM group.
> 
> The Ubuntu 10.4 release is an LTS release, meaning that Ubuntu
> guarantees 5 years of kernel and application bug fixes and backports.
> This release coincides well with our schedule requirements. 10.4 uses
> the 2.6.32 kernel which has an interesting new feature, KSM, aka RAM
> de-dup. It's a bit early yet to see what kind of savings we'll get,
> but for the case where there are multiple VMs running the same OS,
> the savings could be significant.
> 
> This doesn't imply that one can't install 2.6.32 on Debian, but since
> the LTS release is well timed for both our projects I wanted to
> revisit this option. There are savings in terms of developer
> resources and code duplication if both DPM and OSA use this release
> as a domU.
> 
> If moving to Ubuntu is not an option for Orion, I would like to
> propose that the 2.6.32 kernel be considered as an upgrade to the
> debian 5.0's .31 kernel. This is the one area where we would save the
> most developer time as the coupling driver will have kernel
> dependencies.

I completely agree.  For what it's worth, we've already switched to it,
at least in my personal tree.  Also for what it's worth, I have several
Debian Lenny systems running the latest 2.6.32 ~:^)

I think we can expect to see KSM crop up very soon in the VM
implementations.  At the very least, we will be ready for it when it
does.

> -Bruce
> 
> 
> 
