[CentOS-virt] xapi on CentOS 6

Tue Mar 31 10:17:31 UTC 2015
George Dunlap <dunlapg at umich.edu>

KB / Jonathan / Others,

One of our potential GSoC students, Guatam Malu, has proposed trying
to include xapi packages in the "Xen in a Box" project.

He's gotten packages of xapi building for CentOS 6.6 using XenServer's
buildroot (see below).

The only potential issue I see is about signing.

As I understand it, xapi requires a newer version of ocaml than is
available in C6.  The XenServer buildroot includes (and I think
builds) a newer version of ocaml; but (again I think) xapi is
statically linked, so the new ocaml packages are only required for
build, and not for runtime.  At the moment Jonathan is trying to work
with one of the other SIGs to get the necessary ocaml support; it's
not clear when that will happen.

Until that time, the only way to get xapi packages built in koji by
the Virt SIG would be to also include the newer version of ocaml (and
whatever other dependencies there are), which we'd like to avoid.

So the question is: Do we need to have all the packages on "Xen in a
Box" CD signed with the CentOS SIG key?  If so, do we see any
likelihood that this might be possible by July -- either having a
suitable ocaml to build against in koji, or getting the packages built
and signed some other way?

Thanks,
 -George

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 7:03 PM, Gautam Malu
<gautam.malu at research.iiit.ac.in> wrote:
> Hi,
> I am a masters student at IIIT Hyderabad. I have applied for gsoc 2015, for
> xen in a box proposal.
> As a part of my proposal,I want to deliver xapi repo which can be used to
> build a custom installer ISO to install CentOS 6 + xen + xapi.
>
>
> Here is my full proposal
> http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/public/google/gsoc2015/gautam_malu/5629499534213120
>
> About building xapi packages for CentOS; I was able to build all xenserver
> packages with xenserver build root. (https://github.com/xenserver/buildroot)
> on CentOS 6.6 . This buildroot uses Xen4CentOS repo for xen packages, but it
> uses custom repo for Ocaml(4.01).
>
> The Base repo for CentOS 6.6 have ocaml 3.11. This buildroot required Ocaml
> 4.x. The gsoc would start in May end, if Ocaml 4.x packages are ready by
> then, Those could be used to build xapi.
>
> Is there any plan to have xapi as part of virt SIG.
> Is there any time-line  for having ocaml 4.x packages in CentOS offical
> repo.
>
> Best regards,
> Gautam Malu