Xen users - Apr 2013 - blktap 2 (or 3?) and debian wheezy

Hi,


I''m using Xen 4.1.x on debian wheezy. The package I use are the
official ones but slightly modified to build the stubdoms (pv-grub)
which aren''t build in the official ones (for whatever reason).

I''d like to use blktap2 (mostly because I want to develop support for
another image type and this seems the only option), but I''m _really_
confused about what I should use.

There are some blktap2 stuff built inside the xen tree. Only tap-ctl
is installed at the moment but tapdisk-client, tapdisk-diff,
tapdisk-stream, tapdisk2 are also built but not inserted into the
package (and they also don''t seem linked to the proper libraries, most
likely some incomplete debian patch ...)

There is also a blktap-utils package whose source kind of look like
what''s in the xen tree but different at some places. It also seems to
duplicate some of the binaries (like tap-ctl which is installed by xen
package). It also has a _lot_ of dependencies that seem spurious ( I
mean, _why_ would I need to have GCC ??? )

Also, I''m running a custom kernel (I need a bunch of stuff
that''s not
in the default wheezy kernel) and I''ve included the blktap kernel
module directly in the package.


So is anyone using blktap2 on debian wheezy ?


As a final question, what''s up with blktap3 ? The information I see
about it are not very clear (and the wiki is of no help AFAICT).


Cheers,

     Sylvain

> As a final question, what''s up with blktap3 ? The information I
see
> about it are not very clear (and the wiki is of no help AFAICT).
Blktap3 is under development and it will take some time before it can be used as
a blktap2 alternative. If you implement an image driver for blktap2 it should
seamlessly work in blktap3, as the only difference between them is how I/O
requests end up in user space.

Hi,
> If you implement an image driver for blktap2 it should seamlessly work in
blktap3, as the only difference between them is how I/O requests end up in user
space.
Ok great good to know that the work isn''t wasted !

In the mean time I got a git version of blktap2 working and started
working on my own driver.

Cheers,

   Sylvain