[CentOS-virt] Beta CentOS 7 Xen packages available

On 09/08/2015 01:02 PM, George Dunlap wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 11:02 PM, T.Weyergraf <T.Weyergraf at virtfinity.de> wrote:
>
>> First of all, I fully agree, that forked repos are undesirable. However, to
>> the casual observer (like me), there are hardly any ressources for Xen on
>> CentOS 7. There are some beta packages, as announced in the start if this
>> thread, with the latest update being 4.4.2 on 4th of august. I have not yet
>> found any git repo to check out the current Xen 4 CentOS 7 development
>> effort - only the source rpms to the above packages could be used. Likewise,
>> the response on the list on the announcements of the Xen on CentOS 7 beta
>> packages was kind of mute and no further updates were given. This led me to
>> the - apparently false - assumption, that the project kind of fell asleep.
>> I'd be more than happy to at least test development packages and give
>> feedback.
>>
>> Your statement "These RPMs are produced by Citrix, so we need to get the
>> right" irritates me, as I was completely unaware of any "rights" from Citrix
>> to be waited for.
>>
>> Anyway, I will wait for the official Xen4CentOS packages for CentOS 7 and
>> keep my stuff out of the public to avoid useless forks.
See my comments inline as appropriate
> So actually, the SIGs are supposed to be community efforts -- and my
> long term hope was that once the SIG was "jump-started", that
> community members would step up to take over -- or at least step up to
> help significantly.
Cool. Good to know. Well, while I have been using CentOS for several 
years now in both private and professional setups, I have to admit, that 
so far I did not delve into the community itself and make myself 
familiar with its processes and procedures.
It might be time to change that :)
>
> A number of reasons C7 has "stalled":
>
> * Lack of time on my part. I only work 4 days a week for Citrix, and I
> have significant other duties.  Normally I can only spend a day or so
> a week on CentOS stuff; and in particular, the review load relating to
> the 4.6 feature freeze (beginning of July) was very high.  Then I got
> married and went on holiday for 3 weeks in August, which also didn't
> help. :-)
Well, first of all congrats to your recent marriage! I know what your 
were up to lately, as I did the same some 6+ years ago. And much like 
you, I have to dedicate my personal free-time to any effort.
On the plus side, I am a sysadmin actually using Xen4CentOS on top of 
CentOS 6 in a professional production environment, spanning 50 
virtualisation hosts and running over 600 VMs (over 1,500 pCPUs over 
10Tbytes RAM). So I get pretty much of an impression, what it means to 
actually use Xen4CentOS.
>
> * 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".
You already found out in another post, that I actually did test the 
CentOS 7 packages early in july and reported to the list. That lack of 
any response on my report triggered me to do Xen 4 on CentOS7 packages 
myself.
>
> I'm sorry I haven't been very pro-active about pushing to the xen
> package repository -- I didn't know anyone was looking.  (If you asked
> about it, then I must have missed it.)
See above.
>
> 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.
Well, I'd be happy to help. I can easily test things out on my private 
setup, which is all geared towards Xen and virtualisation anyway, so I 
am all setup. To actually contribute, I would ideally like some git-repo 
to checkout, to prep patches against. Those patches, I could send to you 
for review. If there is some process aligned to "the CentOS way of doing 
things", I would need a pointer to some docs to make myself familiar with.
As I have not the faintest clue about what it takes to actually maintain 
a package, i am - at least now - the inappropriate person.
>
> 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.
Yeah, saw that yesterday in the repo. Ok then, I will fetch it soon and 
start testing it in one of my CentOS-7 Xen guests (I run nested-Xen). If 
that test succeeds, I could update the host. That way, these packages 
would get some real-world test, running my zoo of guests.
Oviously, I'll report my findings.
I would propose to see, if that yields anything useful to the 
development of the Xen4CentOS 7 packages. To actually look into code, 
I'll fetch the source-packages of that repo.
>
> The Virt SIG has IRC meetings on freenode channel #centos-devel every
> two weeks -- the next one is today (8 September) at 2pm BST (3pm UTC).
> If anyone wants to help contribute / see what the status of Xen4CentOS
> is, feel free to pop in.
I popped in late, close to closure of the meeting. I resorted to 
readonly, as I wanted to grasp the "style" and scope of the things 
communicated. Unfortunately, being located in Germany means, that this 
time collides with my work-hours and if I can allocate some time to 
attend remains to be seen.
>
>   -George
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Regards,
Thomas