[CentOS-virt] Beta CentOS 7 Xen packages available

Nico Kadel-Garcia

nkadel at gmail.com
Tue Sep 8 11:26:18 UTC 2015


On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 7:02 AM, George Dunlap <dunlapg at umich.edu> wrote:

> * Apparent lack of testing by the community. About a month after the
> C7 "beta", I was about to announce an actual release, when I happened
> to discover that HVM guests wouldn't boot -- not under any
> configuration.  This is really basic core functionality that nobody at
> all had tested (or if they had they hadn't complained).  This
> convinced me that I couldn't rely on community testing, and prompted
> me to spend some time writing an automated test suite that would at
> least do a basic smoke-test for a number of configurations.  I've got
> this working for the core xen package, but I was planning on extending
> it to libvirt before declaring CentOS 7 "ready".

A lot of it is market forces. A lot of people who used to run their
own VM's have basically given up, and allow AWS or similar services to
do it for them. Learning a few command line tools is often a *lot*
faster, and cheaper, than running your own virtualization
infrastructure. Heck, I *published* the first public RPM's for Xen,
way back in 1997 before it was bought by Citrix, and I don't have the
time and hardware in hand to do it anymore!

I'm also afraid a lot of us have basically given up on CentOS 7, while
the developer community deals with all the multiple OS issues of the
systemd reworking of network and init configuration, the-arranged
"/bin" versus "/usr/bin" overlap of component locations, and the
profound lack of EPEL for CentOS 6 or Fedora published perl and python
modules ported to CentOS 7. That's not a CentOS team issue, that's a
RHEL issue, but it's profoundly lowering interest in both hypervisors
and VM's that are CentOS 7 based.

> I would be happy to have help improving the packages.  I would be
> *very* happy to have help maintaining the Xen4CentOS packages, and I
> would be *delighted* if someone wanted to take over maintainership of
> the packages entirely.
>
> FYI I have just finished rebasing things to 4.6-rc2 (there are
> packages in virt7-xen-46-candidate now), and am in the process of
> switching things over to systemd.

And that is one of the parts that is sucking away testing time on a
lot of open source or freeware projects. The systemd integration of
init scripts, networking tools, and the /bin symlink to /usr/bin have
been breaking a *lot* of previously stable components. A lot of us are
basically giving CentOS 7 a miss until and unless the rest of the
stable server community can catch up with the environment changes.



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