[CentOS-virt] CentOS 6 Virt SIG Xen 4.6 packages available in centos-virt-xen-testing

Thu Jan 21 15:52:18 UTC 2016
George Dunlap <dunlapg at umich.edu>

On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 3:39 PM, Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org> wrote:
> On 01/21/2016 09:29 AM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
>> This is a community SIG .. and xenproject.org does NOT release XSAs for
>> 4.2.  The goal of Xen4centOS was to use an upstream LTS kernel and
>> update those as required to stay on an LTS.  Also to do every second
>> point release of xen (ie, 4.2, 4.4, 4.6).  All so we are longer term
>> than upstream, BUT we have supported code from upstream.
>>
>> So, the goal is to use supported code for the longest amount of time the
>> upsreams support them.  For xenproject.org .. they support the two
>> newest releases.  For kernel.org, they do a new kernel LTS about every 2
>> years.
>>
>> We don't have 5000 engineers to maintain community SIGs like they
>> maintain the distro.  We have to have supported code from upstream projects.
>>
>>
>
> So what does this mean ..
>
> xenproject.org supports 4.6 and 4.5 right now. (last 2 releases).

This isn't exactly right.

Recent releases have 18 months of "support" (meaning, bug fixes are
backported), and then another 18 months of "security backports", which
means only XSAs are backported [1], regardless of when or how many
releases have been made.  It just happens that most releases recently
have ended up taking about 9 months, which means at any given time you
have 2 in 'active support'; but that's mostly a coincidence. :-)

So 4.4 won't be getting any more point releases, but it should
continue to get XSAs through March 2017.  (This table [2] has it
ending in March 2016, but I'm pretty sure that's a mistake.)

 -George

[1] http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Maintenance_Releases

[2] http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Release_Features