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

[Alex Bligh <alex@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jan,

--On 14 June 2013 13:26:59 +0100 Jan Beulich <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > > > 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.
Yes. I meant anything other than -unstable. And as you say, it may be
(let's hope!) that this is an echo from the past (i.e. 4.2) and 4.3
will be great.

> 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.
That's partly the case, yes, and a fair point. We assumed the move to
4.2 was far easier than it turn out to be (because of API changes)
and concentrated on getting our own stuff to work with 4.2, rather
than trying 4.2 with xl etc. in anger. In our defence, all our
torture tests test our own software controlling xen.

However, I still feel the internal testing (automated or whatever)
should have picked some of these up.

> > 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.
I can't remember now either. And the root of this is a kernel bug,
which we are working around. However, this was a known problem: Ian
Campbell (apologies if this was Ian J) discovered it in 2007 I think!
(links at the top of the original thread if people are interested
in the gory details).

--
Alex Bligh

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