I’ve been using Xen for a while now but I’ve not found an OS I’ve really been happy with for running a Dom0. I tried Ubuntu for a while, and while it’s Xen support is fine it’s not such a great server OS at this time (like bug 120375). Debian 4.0 (Etch) does not have blktap support in its kernels. Debian 5.0 (Lenny) will not ship with a dom0 kernel. I suspect Centos 5.2 might be my next attempt. I may also investigate non-GNU/Linux systems though I’ve not heard particularly good things about then Xen support.

I was remarking to a colleague the other day that the reason there is so much filesystem development these days is that it is deeply understood, if not often expressed, that there are features which people want in a filesystem that are not available in any of the current filesystems. The problem, in my opinion, is that development efforts are so splintered that the lack of certain features does not lead to 1 or 2 new filesystems but far more. For disk file systems there is already Btrfs, NILFS, ext4, ChunkFS, Tux3, and more. And then there are cluster file systems…

I was wondering about what it would cost to buy an inexpensive server class quad-core system. The requirements were to have a relatively energy efficient server class (Xeon, Opteron) quad-core processor combined with a barebones server with at least 4 hot-swap sata bays.