Xen repo update and new gizmos

I’ve been doing a little work on the development and repo hosting side of things. We now have 5 mirrors around the globe mirroring these packages. Sadly, they don’t always update at the same time - so today I’ve implemented a script to check each mirror hourly and either add or remove it from the mirror pool as they change into or out of sync.

This brings me to the next change. I’ve updated the kernel-xen-release package to revision 3 now. This uses the mirrorlist directive by default to take advantage of the script mentioned above to automatically exclude out of sync mirrors… This is a much more flexible system and will cause less errors as updates are pushed out to mirrors.

The third change is that I have now also build Xen for a 32 bit (i386) environment. I am still working on a kernel for this - so work is not yet complete - however the core hypervisor and associated tools as well as an updated bridge-utils package is also available for use on 32 bit systems. Once I get a successful kernel build, I’ll be making it available via the 32 bit repo.

The fourth and final change today is the addition of the $basearch tag in all mirrors. This will allow compatibility with all systems I’d expect to see Xen packages for without having to change too may things manually.

The update to kernel-xen-release-6-3 should be pain free using yum -y update kernel-xen-release and you’ll need to do this to be able to continue using the repo going forward.