Mailing List Archive

Raspberry Pi 4 Xen or KVM
Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) is interesting platform to run as server (if your
succeed to get 8GB version). It uses very little power, so it is
ecologic solution.

To use Raspberry as VM host, what are pros and cons with traditional
QEMU/KVM vs Xen? Is it so, that because KVM runs on linux kernel, linux
guests can use more memory than XEN guests? Or can one or other host be
installed "Out of the box", but another needs special compiling and
configuration?

--
Reijo Korhonen
Re: Raspberry Pi 4 Xen or KVM [ In reply to ]
Am 03.08.2023 um 22:59 schrieb reijo.korhonen@gmail.com:
> Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) is interesting platform to run as server (if your
> succeed to get 8GB version). It uses very little power, so it is
> ecologic solution.
>
> To use Raspberry as VM host, what are pros and cons with traditional
> QEMU/KVM vs Xen? Is it so, that because KVM runs on linux kernel, linux
> guests can use more memory than XEN guests? Or can one or other host be
> installed "Out of the box", but another needs special compiling and
> configuration?
I can't make any statement regarding a comparison between Xen and KVM on
a Raspberry Pi, as I have no experience using KVM (on any platform).

However, I can say that to get Xen running on a Raspberry Pi 4B (using
Debian, not Raspbian, and UEFI->Grub bootloader), I needed to build Xen
myself with ACPI enabled. This was discussed very recently on this list.
Once I figured out how to build Xen (with help from Julien),
installation and setup was fairly easy and not really different to a
installation with a package manager. I needed to manually enable some
services, but that's the only big difference that I remeber.

If you use U-Boot as a bootloader, you should be able to use the
standard Xen packages provided by Debian (I didn't try that out myself).

Xen has been running flawlessly on my RPi since installation a couple of
days ago.

Paul