[CentOS-virt] Virt SIG roadmap

[George Dunlap]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 5:53 PM, George Dunlap <dunlapg at umich.edu> wrote:
> As promised, in preparation for next week's SIG meeting, here's a
> kick-off discussion about the Virtualization SIG roadmap.
>
> I'm mainly tossing out ideas here -- see this is an invitation to
> discussion.
>
> Key things I think should be on the roadmap:
>
> * Release process
>  - General cadence
>  - Estimate of the next release (if any)
> * Specification of targets
>  - Right now, mainly xen4centos
>     - What packages?
> * "Backlog" of work items
>  - Updates (mostly suggested by Pasi)
>  - Items caveats from Russ P's CentOS talk
>
> == Release process ==
>
> I don't have any real opinions on this -- KB / Johnny, did you guys
> have a vision for what the release schedule for any of the SIGs would
> look like?  Are we going to have specific releases, or just continue
> to do rolling updates?  If so, how frequent should the updates be?
>
> Obviously estimates for releases will need to wait until all the
> infrastructure has been set up, and we've discussed cadence / targets,
> &c.
>
> == Targets ==
>
> Targets will depend on community support.  I'll be committing to
> extending the Xen4CentOS project.  There was talk of having an OpenVZ
> variant, but that would require someone to actually step up and do the
> work to integrate and support it.
>
> == Backlog ==
>
> Most of the items below are from the discussion Pasi started in
> February; a couple are from Russ Pavliczek's slides at a talk given
> recently.
>
> * Pull in updates f/ XenServer
>  > Suggested by dvrabel in http://marc.info/?l=centos-virt&m=139289353315469
>  - 0001-x86-xen-rename-early_p2m_alloc-and-early_p2m_alloc_m.patch
>  - 0008-x86-remove-the-Xen-specific-_PAGE_IOMAP-PTE-flag.patch
>  -  0160676bba69523e8b0ac83f306cce7d342ed7c8 (xen/p2m: check MFN is in range
> before using the m2p table)
>  - 7cde9b27e7b3a2e09d647bb4f6d94e842698d2d5 (xen: Fix possible user space
> selector corruption)
> * Xen 4.4 (Xen + qemu)
> * libvirt: 1.2.2
>  - Possibly with migration / pci pass-through back-ported?
> * dom0 / xen serial console
> * Ballooning bug?
>  > http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=6893
> * UEFI?
>
>
> Anything else we need to discuss / plan?

At our bi-weekly meeting today, we talked about what the general
approach to releases has been.

For Xen, major updates to packages will happen when the upstream
releases.  The plan at the moment is to do this every other release;
so we would update to 4.4, but probably not update again until 4.5.

Between those times, we will generaly be pulling in bug fixes by
consuming point releases when they happen.  Security updates will of
course be pushed out immediately, as will bugs that affect a
significant number of users.

We didn't discuss this, but I would expect that libvirt might be similar to Xen.

For Linux, the plan is to consume one of the LTS kernels.  At the
moment, that's 3.10.  In general, the plan is to update to a new LTS
kernel every 2 years.  However, whenever there is a major release (for
example, with RHEL 7 coming out soon), we may consider moving to a
newer kernel for CentOS 6 sooner, so that the Virt SIG can maintain
only a single kernel version across all CentOS releases.

The initial target for the Virt SIG will be to update the packages
inherited from xen4centos to Xen 4.4 and libvirt 1.2.2.

We're currently in the process of brainstorming a "backlog" of work
items that might be a good idea.  Some things we've come up with so
far:

* CentOS 7 testing branch

* Making a useful Xen CD image
 - Live CD?
 - With pre-made CentOS guest images?
 - Ready to be set up as an OpenStack node?

* Getting some kind of automated testing infrastructure set up

KB / Lars / Johnny, anything I missed / didn't get quite right?

 -George