Dropping support for Xen 3.x [DEPRECATION WARNING]

by Michael Tremer, August 26, 2013

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Hey,

the IPFire development team would like to warn all users of IPFire that run IPFire within a Xen hypervisor of version 3.x, that this will be soon deprecated and that you won’t receive any updates for this setup any more.

Why?

We are going to remove Xen support for very old versions of the software, because we want to make the distribution more slink. Currently, an extra kernel (based on the also very old Linux 2.6.32) is built with a set of patches which enable it run in a paravirtualized environment of Xen 3.x. The two problems we now do have with this is a) the patchset only applies for Linux 2.6.32, so we cannot update the kernel and b) Linux 2.6.32 is barely maintained, so we cannot guarantee to fix all security vulnerabilities there are in the Linux kernel.

Xen support will still be available!

That does not mean, that we are going to drop support for Xen! In recent releases of IPFire, full Xen support is already included in the base image, so this extra kernel is no longer necessary. Also, if you are running Xen, you would probably like to update to Xen 4.x any way.

Please, if you are still using Xen 3.x, consider updating your virtualization host to some more recent version of Xen (or even KVM, which is way better :D) and update your IPFire system. We have not yet decided when we are finally going to remove the Xen kernel, so you will still have some time to do the migration work, but prepare for the end of the year.

Thanks for understanding!