Hey all!
It’s time again for some status update regarding VServer/OpenVZ, so i thought i use my spare time for blog dedusting 😉
First, we have created the Gentoo VPS project, in order to concert the development of different implementations, and provide a convenient way for use with gentoo. The project page can be found at http://dev.croup.de/proj/gentoo-vps including Documentation and anonymous SVN access to our repository. The repository contains all patches and scripts for ebuilds in portage (openvz-sources, vserver-sources, util-vserver and vzctl), an experimental overlay, vserver stage building scripts and of course baselayout-vserver.
We also moved the old vserver profile (vserver/x86) to default-linux/x86/2005.1/vserver to provide a profile compliant to the default ones. While doing this, we also added a vserver profile for amd64 (in default-linux/amd64/2005.1/vserver).
There also has been some bug fixing in util-vserver regarding start/stop/restart behaviour and supported init styles. Now, both 1.11.14 and 1.12.0_pre* only support the plain init style, and they will never support the gentoo init style again. So, please consider the gentoo init style a deprecated workaround, and do not use it anymore!
Having fixed so many things, there was also a need for new stages, especially with regard to the profile move. So we built new stages for x86 and amd64, which can now be found on the gentoo mirrors in the experimental/{arch}/vserver directory. There won’t be any stages on my space on dev.gentoo.org anymore, so please update your bookmarks, if you have any 😉
The last weeks have also brought some new releases to the VServer community, including a bugfix release of the stable VServer branch (2.0.1) and the first release of the next development branch (2.1.0). A list of changes can be found at http://www.13thfloor.at/vserver/s_rel26/overview or http://www.13thfloor.at/vserver/d_rel26/overview/ respectively.
Also, as some of you may have noticed, i started an alternative userspace implementation for util-vserver, which is meant to be clean, arch independant and legacy-free. With the release of 2.1.0 i have made the first development version (1.0.x) available to the public. It can be found at http://dev.croup.de/proj/vserver-utils . Be aware that these new utils do not contain all features the current utils do, but the implemented ones should work quite reliable. Feel free to test and report any issues!
Last but not least, OpenVZ has made it into the tree, and alongside the VServer X-Mas stabilisation, i marked all OpenVZ components stable on x86 and amd64 too. There are still some bugs in the stages with regard to OpenVZ, which will be fixed during the next release; everything else should work quite well.
To make this blog post a bit more interactive, i have prepared a Gentoo Linux-VServer usage survey, in order to collect some usage information from Gentoo users. It would be very kind if you’d spend another five minutes to fill out the form, and help us to improve VServer in Gentoo even more.
Also if you feel generous or just like the work for Gentoo VServer/OpenVZ and want to support further development, you can take a look at my Amazon Wishlist or just make a PayPal donation to hollow@gentoo.org
Thanks for your support and attention, and merry X-Mas to you all.
Benedikt