[CentOS-virt] Virt SIG roadmap

[Pasi Kärkkäinen]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 05:23:57PM +0100, George Dunlap wrote:
> 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.
> 

Sorry I couldn't make it to the meeting!

> 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.
> 

Makes sense. RHEL7 (rc) seems to be based on 3.10.x aswell:

http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/rhel/rc/7/Server/x86_64/os/Packages/

> 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.
> 

RHEL7 (rc) is based on libvirt-1.1.1. 

It would be nice to share the same base version as el7 does,
but I guess the recent libvirt/Xen/libxl work by Jim is only in libvirt 1.2.x ? 


> 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


-- Pasi