Red Hat partner summit is over and i really enjoyed it for both the technical labs/presentations and the nice discussions i had with Red Hat employees (for example i really appreciated Boris Devouge's talks). One thing that was announced is the upcoming release of Paravirt drivers for Windows DomU. (probably they will be released somewhere between 5.2 and 5.3). I've seen them in action during a lab organized by Olivier Reneault and it's funny to see that Windows device manager reports them as 'RHEL scsi driver disk' and 'RHEL PV nic driver'. It seems the goal (as usual with Red Hat, in opposite with what Novell is always doing regarding this ...) is to release them under the GPL. In fact, my discussion with Olivier learned me that they were/are developed in collaboration with Hitachi.

Other thing that i learned is that PV drivers/modules for EL3 are on the way too (you'll never have a xen kernel for el3 because of its 2.4 kernel ...) so that you'll have better performances too.

During some presentations and labs it was mentionned also that RHN/Satellite technology will also be released as open-source/gpl but the main stopping problem is that actually both products use Oracle as a backend, and that explains also the prices for such products. I explained to them that what i do for some customers who want to save bandwidth without having to pay for Satellite is that i use reposync (from the yum-utils package) to mirror the rhn channels on a local machine .. and i was astonished that some RH tech people didn't know that it was included in the base EL5 ...

Last but not least is the fact that the Partner portal changed a bit several weeks ago and i decided to update the profile. When you do it you're asked several questions including 'Which products do you actually support ?' and in the list, below RHEL, SLES and MS windows i saw CentOS ... ;-)