Re: [Xen-devel] [Hackathon Minutes] Xen 4.4 Planning

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

>>> On 14.06.13 at 13:46, Alex Bligh <alex@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm not unhappy with the rate of stable releases, I am/was unhappy about
> the quality of stable releases (particularly 4.2).

Oh, okay, so we seem to mean slightly different things with "stable
releases" - you seem to mean x.y.0 (in the current numbering
scheme), whereas to me this means x.y.z, with z != 0. Indeed,
there had been many bad bugs in 4.2.0, presumably at least partly
because of its overlong development cycle. But I think we got most
of them sorted out by now, with 4.2.2 being out.

> All our testing to
> date on 4.3 indicates it's a lot higher quality release, at least
> for what we want it for.

Let's hope for this to be true - a lower rate of fixes going into
what I call stable releases would be very much to my taste.

>>> We like it even less if we have to find them and fix them.
>>
>> But isn't that how open source projects work - everyone contributes
>> and fixes bugs. If you don't want to help fixing bugs, I'm afraid
>> there's also no good reason for you to complain they don't get fixed.
> 
> I should have explicitly added the words 'in stable releases'. We're
> perfectly happy to test, find bugs, etc. and indeed contribute fixes
> as we have done. However, we shouldn't (in my opinion) be finding these
> in stable releases.

Which implies that the features you were after weren't tested
sufficiently before the major release went out. Which may (but
doesn't have to) be an indicator that you didn't get to test them
early enough.

>>> By 'serious' I mean basic functionality not working, crashes dom0, etc.
>>
>> When did we last break Dom0, and not fix it in a timely manner?
> 
> Well, the 'fatal crash on Xen4.2 HVM' thread that started on 14 Dec 2012
> had the last fix committed on 5 Apr 2013, and I think came out in 4.2.2
> on 23 April. Between those points, as far as I'm concerned anything
> running with network backed VMs was likely to crash dom0. That's about
> half a 9 month release cycle.

I participated in this discussion only very early on, and hence
don't really know which fixes for this got committed where and
when. Which may mean that none of them were actually to the
hypervisor.

Jan


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