[Xen-devel] 3.0-testing

["Ian Pratt" <m+Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Folks,

Things are beginning to come together, and I think the target of forking
off the 3.0-testing tree before OLS (e.g. around July 16) is tough but
just about attainable. We won't quite be in a position where the
3.0-testing tree is purely bug fixes only, but everything that will
remain to be incorporated before 3.0.0 is self contained and relatively
low risk.

The key items we've got to finish off before the 3.0-testing fork are:
  1. integration of new time API. [This is close to working]
  2. switching block, net and console over to xenbus/xenstore. [lots to
do!]
  3. integrating Vincent's 2.6.12 upgrade patch and the net grant tables
patch. [easy]
  4. x86_32 PAE dom0 patches. [fairly close]

We're also keen to see the following incorporated if possible:
  5. x86_64 using writeable pagetables interface, ideally SMP too.
[plenty to do]
  6. Stephan's simple CPU load ballancer. [prototype close]
  7. x86_32 PAE domU builder patches [plenty to do]
  8. save/restore of multi VCPU contexts [plenty to do]

The critical path item is #2 (switching block, net and console over to
xenbus/xenstore). This seems to be making decent progress over the last
few days though. It's important that we get this feature in ASAP as it's
a high-risk Xen API-changing feature that we want to undergo the full
testing cycle.

The key feature that 3.0-testing will be missing is save/restore/migrate
for x86_64 and x86_32 PAE. Even for plain x86_32 save/restore/migrate
wont be particularly well tested going in to 3.0-testing as we need the
tools work complete before we can give it a good work out. We should be
able to incorporate and test the outstanding save/restore/migrate issues
before 3.0.0. For more detail see the developer section on the wiki.

As regards testing, we're working on a number of different fronts to get
some good infrastructure in place:

 * 3.0-testing CD. This is a live ISO like the demo CD, but is used to
test Xen on the underlying hardware platform. We're hoping that as many
members of the community as possible will try the test CD on their
platforms and report the results via a web form. We'll collate the
information and maintain a summary web page.

 * New regression test suite. We're working on a sophisticated test
suite that will run a wide range of benchmarks and test programs
[lmbench, ttcp, ltp, kernbench, reaim, postmark, osdb/postgresql, ace
tcp_test, specjbb, tbench, dbench, crashme] under a variety of
situations [UP and SMP domains, multiple concurrent domains,
communicating domains etc.] The final phase of the test will also
exercise the tools, adding/removing CPUs, adding/removing memory,
migrating domains etc. This is going to be a really good work out for
xen and guest kernels. Stay tuned...

Best,
Ian

 



Ian

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