[Xen-devel] Xen 4.4 development update

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm filing in for George while he is on vacation and travelling to a
conference etc. I'm still coming up to speed wrt what is going on with
this release so please do correct me when I'm wrong. George will be
back on 20 January.

This information will be mirrored on the Xen 4.4 Roadmap wiki page:
 http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Roadmap/4.4

We tagged 4.4.0-rc1 on 19 December. Based on the conversation had last
time and on George's final comments in [1] I think this means that PVH
dom0 support has not made the cut for 4.4, which is a shame but there
is plenty of good functionality (including PVH domU support) in there.

[1] http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/mid/%3C52B05C0A.4040404@xxxxxxxxxxxxx%3E

= Timeline =

Here is our current timeline based on a 6-month release:

* Feature freeze: 18 October 2013 
* Code freezing point: 18 November 2013
* First RCs: 6 December 2013  <== WE ARE HERE
* Release: 21 January 2014

Last updated: 8 January 2014

== Completed ==

* Event channel scalability (FIFO event channels)

* Non-udev scripts for driver domains (non-Linux driver domains)

* Multi-vector PCI MSI (Hypervisor side)

* Improved Spice support on libxl
 - Added Spice vdagent support
 - Added Spice clipboard sharing support
 - Spice usbredirection support for upstream qemu 

* PHV domU (experimental only)

* pvgrub2 checked into grub upstream

* ARM64 guest

* Guest EFI booting (tianocore)

* kexec

* Testing: Xen on ARM

* Update to SeaBIOS 1.7.3.1

* Update to qemu 1.6

* SWIOTLB (in Linux 3.13)

* Disk: indirect descriptors (in 3.11)

* Reworked ocaml bindings 

== Resolved since last update ==

== Open ==

* xl support for vnc and vnclisten options with PV guests
 > http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/bug/25
 status: V4 patch posted. Should go in.
 Blocker?

* libxl / xl does not handle failure of remote qemu gracefully
  > Related to http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/bug/29
  > Easiest way to reproduce: 
  >  - set "vncunused=0" and do a local migrate
  >  - The "remote" qemu will fail because the vnc port is in use
  > The failure isn't the problem, but everything being stuck afterwards is
 Ian J investigating

* xl needs to disallow PoD with PCI passthrough
  >see 
http://xen.1045712.n5.nabble.com/PATCH-VT-d-Dis-allow-PCI-device-assignment-if-PoD-is-enabled-td2547788.html

* qemu-upstream not freeing pirq 
 > http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/xen/devel/281498
 > http://marc.info/?l=xen-devel&m=137265766424502
 status: patches posted; latest patches need testing
 Not a blocker.

* Race in PV shutdown between tool detection and shutdown watch
 > http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/xen/devel/282467
 > Nothing to do with ACPI
 status: Patches posted
 Not a blocker.

* xl does not support specifying virtual function for passthrough device
 > http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/bug/22
 Too much work to be a blocker.

* xl does not handle migrate interruption gracefully
  > If you start a localhost migrate, and press "Ctrl-C" in the middle,
  > you get two hung domains
 Ian J investigated -- can of worms, too big to be a blocker for 4.4

* Win2k3 SP2 RTC infinite loops
   > Regression introduced late in Xen-4.3 development
   owner: andrew.cooper@citrix
   status: patches posted, undergoing review. ( v2 ID
1386241748-9617-1-git-send-email-andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx )

  > andyhhp: my proposed RTC fixes break migrate from older versions of
  > Xen, so I have to redesign it from scratch. no way it is going to
  > be ready for 4.4

* HPET interrupt stack overflow (when using hpet_broadcast mode and MSI
capable HPETs)
  owner: andyh@citrix
  status: patches posted, undergoing review iteration.

  > andyhhp: I have more work to do on the HPET series
  > andyhhp: no way it is going to be ready or safe for 4.4

* PCI hole resize support hvmloader/qemu-traditional/qemu-upstream with PCI/GPU 
passthrough
  > http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/bug/28
  > http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2013-05/msg02813.html
  > Where Stefano writes:
  > 2) for Xen 4.4 rework the two patches above and improve
  > i440fx_update_pci_mem_hole: resizing the pci_hole subregion is not
  > enough, it also needs to be able to resize the system memory region
  > (xen.ram) to make room for the bigger pci_hole

  status: not going to be fixed for 4.4 either. Created bug #28.

* qemu memory leak?
  > http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-users/2013-03/msg00276.html

* qemu-* parses "008" as octal in USB bus.addr format
  > http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/bug/15
  > just needs documenting
  Anthony Perard to patch docs

* osstest windows-install failures
  > http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/bug/29
  > http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~xensrcts/logs/24250/
  Anthony and/or Jan investigating

=== Big ticket items ===

* PVH dom0 (w/ Linux) 
  blocker
  owner: mukesh@oracle, george@citrix
  status (Linux): Acked, waiting for ABI to be nailed down
  status (Xen): v6 posted; no longer considered a blocker

* libvirt/libxl integration (external)
 - owner: jfehlig@suse, dario@citrix
 - patches posted (should be released before 4.4)
  - migration
  - PCI pass-through
 - In progress
  - integration w/ libvirt's lock manager
  - improved concurrency



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