[CentOS-virt] ANNOUNCE: centos-release-xen switching to 4.8 next week

Thu Aug 2 10:58:09 UTC 2018
T.Weyergraf <T.Weyergraf at virtfinity.de>

Hi

Thanks for providing updated Packages, they are much appreciated. At 
work, we are currently running an entire production infrastructure on 
Xen4CentOS, with quite some success.

We are looking into a refresh towards CentOS 7 along with newer Xen and 
Dom0 Kernel packages. However, even the updated packages are quite old. 
Xen 4.8 is out of active support since June and will see the end of 
security support in less than a year. Likewise, a newer LTS kernel 
(4.14) exists for quite some time, while the Xen4CentOS effort currently 
uses 4.9.

Are there any short to mid-term plans to bump both versions to more 
current ones (i.e.: 4.10 and 4.14)? Currently, our update-tests are 
based on 4.10 candidate packages with kernel 4.9. Given the support 
timelines, I'd rather prefer 4.10 over 4.8. A change in Xen versions has 
been never successfully performed using live-migration between versions, 
so a reboot of more or less our entire infrastructure is required. 
Something you would not consider light-hearted.

As a side note, is there anything reasonable, people like me could to, 
to support the speed-up of that process? I would consider testing to be 
important, but are there any regression test-suites, one could use? I am 
aware, there are such tests, but I have not found something to actually 
try in our test-infrastructure.

Finally a big shout-out and kudos to the Xen community and Xen4CentOS. 
Your work is used and much appreciated.

Regards,

Thomas


On 08/02/2018 12:32 PM, Anthony PERARD wrote:
> Greeting,
>
> We are about to update the centos-release-xen package to point to Xen
> 4.8 rather than 4.6. I'll push the update next week.
>
> As a reminder, you can "pin" your installation to Xen 4.6 by installing
> centos-release-xen-46 and then removing centos-release-xen.
>
> And for the more adventurous, that update will come with a new package
> centos-release-xen-410 to install Xen 4.10.
>
> (Testing will be updated today.)
>
> Cheers,
>