[Xen-devel] [PATCH RFC 0/4] tools: Upstream blktap "2.5" as an external repo

[George Dunlap <george.dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

For some time, the blktap2 in-tree has bitrotted.  Many years ago the
XenServer team at Citrix forked the code into a separate repository;
several attempts have been made to upstream those changes back into
Xen, to no avail.

The blktap code at the moment is the only source of performant vhd
format integration.  It's additionally in use by projects like the
COLO project.

This patch series removes the in-tree blktap2 code and treats the
XenServer blktap tree as an upstream.  I've gotten agreement from the
XenServer team to act as an upstream -- to accept patches fixing bugs,
to help track down errors, and to attempt to help fix build breakages
introduced by development.

At the moment we're using the "blktap2" branch of XenServer's
blktap.git.  (This has been sometimes known as "blktap 2.5".)  This
branch is maintianed in order to provide a buildroot for OpenStack,
and has also been used by the CentOS xen packages for several years
now.

The series consists of four patches:

1/4 Reorg tools/Makefile so all "external repo" targets are together

2/4 Add external blktap repo; build but don't install

3/4 Modify libxl to use external repo; stop building in-tree blktap2

4/4 Remove blktap2 from xen.git

The last patch is pretty massive and not very interesting, so it won't be sent 
with
this series.  The full patch series can be found here:

git://xenbits.xen.org/people/gdunlap/xen.git  out/blktap25/rfc-v1

This series has some niggles (noted in the patches themselves), and so it not 
yet
ready to apply as-is.

One of the big things to note is that blktap.git seems to require
autogen to build; at the moment including this patch will increase the
build dependencies to include autoconf and libtool.  It would be good
if we could remove this dependency before a release, if possible.

 -George Dunlap

CC: Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>
CC: Ian Jackson <ian.jackson@xxxxxxxxxx>
CC: Wei Liu <wei.liu2@xxxxxxxxxx>
CC: Dave Scott <Dave.Scott@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
CC: Jonathan Ludlam <Jonathan.Ludlam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
CC: Wen Congyang <wency@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
CC: Yang Hongyang <yanghy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


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