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 install 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.
Some useful links:
- Our general roadmap for this project (and XCP in general) can be found here: http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/XCP_Roadmap
- Instructions for installing 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.
- For building the toolstack from source, Jon Ludlam has an autobuilder repository on github here: https://github.com/jonludlam/xapi-autobuilder
To use the xapi autobuilder, 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!
