Re: [Xen-API] how to compile XCP source?

[Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik@xxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 03:29:52PM +0000, Dave Scott wrote:
>    Hi,
>

Hello! (after almost two months :) 
 
> 
>    [cc:d Pasi who I know is interested in this too]
> 
>    As James says, I've been investigating what we need to do to make XCP into
>    a "proper open-source project" i.e. one where
> 
>    ·         Anyone can checkout the source and build it easily
> 
>    ·         Anyone can "scratch their own itch" and contribute code to the
>    community
> 
>    ·         We all can collaborate more easily together, without hitting
>    annoying show-stopper problems
> 

Yes, this is really important! 


> 
>    The first area I'd like to fix is building. I am determined to make all of
>    XCP easy to build. I've written up a proposal on the xen wiki here:
> 
>    [1]http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Making_XCP_easy_to_build
> 
>    I'd really appreciate your feedback on this. I tried to list some of the
>    common `use cases' but there are probably more!
> 

Comment about the "proposed future state" on the wiki page:

Many people use XCP (iso) today because it has the close relationship with 
XenServer,
so XenServer docs/faqs/scripts etc are pretty much directly suitable for XCP. 

Having XCP deb/rpm packages in 'stable' Linux distributions is good,
but due to different release schedules, lifecycles and maintenance-policies 
it's very difficult to have the "current supported XCP version" in all distros. 
We'd end up with different distros having different versions of XCP.. 
but it's probably better to have something instead of nothing? :)

What's your thought of this? Also what does Citrix want to do with XenServer in 
the future? 
I think XCP should be as close to XenServer as possible in the future aswell! 

.. with the difference that developers *and* users can rebuild the whole thing 
easily.
This is very important when there are competing platforms like oVirt these days!

So I think there's value in having XCP-iso style appliance which is a 
'dedicated virtualization platform', like it's today. 

As Ian Pratt said at XenSummit a couple of years ago we should make XCP (iso)
the reference stable Xen implementation! (with all of the above fixed, 
obviously). 

> 
> 
>    I think we need to support multiple ways of building components:
> 
>    1.       The development source packages should just support "./configure
>    && make && make install"
>

True.
 
>    2.       The development source package dependencies should be easy to
>    install (and not conflict with other packages)
> 

Yep.

>    3.       We should host an up-to-date repo on xenbits.xen.org containing
>    binary snapshot RPMs for early adopters to test via "yum upgrade" (or
>    "apt-get upgrade")
> 

Maybe two different repos? unstable and stable? 

>    4.       We should make our code as portable and as easy to package as
>    possible, to make the lives of upstream distro packagers easier.
> 

Definitely. Which includes upstreaming (or reworking) all the bits 
that today require custom hacking/patching on XCP userland.. 

> 
>    Looking at the recent commits I think we are making some progress on
>    making our code more portable: it's now possible to build the latest
>    master branch of some of our components like "xenopsd" and "squeezed" on
>    `ordinary' CentOS/Ubuntu/Debian systems. I think Jon Ludlam (cc:d) has
>    been making progress fixing the dependencies of xapi - how far have you
>    got, Jon? Personally I'm running "xenopsd" on my Debian unstable laptop
>    and my Ubuntu desktop, which is really nice. I'd like to run xapi there
>    too (as well as on my XCP hosts)
>

Yep, this is good! 
 
> 
> 
>    Let me know what you think!
> 
>    I think that sorting these problems out is even higher priority than
>    adding new features to XCP - what do you think?
>

I agree. 

So what are the next steps? How can people help? What's the status now? 


Thanks,

-- Pasi

> 
> 
>    Cheers,
> 
>    Dave Scott
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>    From: xen-api-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:xen-api-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
>    On Behalf Of James Bulpin
>    Sent: 28 February 2013 12:48 PM
>    To: George Shuklin
>    Cc: xen-api@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>    Subject: Re: [Xen-API] how to compile XCP source?
> 
> 
> 
>    Good input, thanks. I view the library and compiler dependencies as part
>    of the general build environment problem and hence are in scope for the
>    changes we want to make. My aim is that XCP is both "free as in beer" and
>    "free as in speech". I want us to get to the point where you can rebuild
>    any XCP component and submit patches back to the project as easily as you
>    could rebuild Postgres and submit patches back to its project. Dave Scott
>    is leading the team here to look at how we do that whilst continuing to
>    produce the commercial products that fund this work - expect to see
>    something from him on this soon.
> 
> 
> 
>    Regards,
> 
>    James
> 
> 
> 
>    --
> 
>    James Bulpin
> 
>    Sr Director, Technology, XenServer
> 
>    Citrix
> 
> 
> 
>    From: George Shuklin [[2]mailto:george.shuklin@xxxxxxxxx]
>    Sent: 28 February 2013 12:23
>    To: James Bulpin
>    Cc: [3]xen-api@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>    Subject: Re: [Xen-API] how to compile XCP source?
> 
> 
> 
>    The main problem is not 'environment out of the box' but the exact
>    versions of libraries, compilers and so on.  Because xapi-libs heavily
>    depends on random set of libraries outside the xapi source tree, and there
>    is no way to know witch version to use. Sometimes there is a situation
>    that xapi depends on library foo and bar, and foo (in upstream) depends on
>    different (conflicting) version of bar. And it definitively not compilable
>    on centos5 (because of outdated ocaml for el5)...
> 
>    To be honest I was strong supporter for xapi. But time flows - XCP 0.5,
>    XCP 1.1, XCP 1.5, XCP 1.6. Every time we found an working ISO with working
>    binaries we can use like 'free version of XenServer'. But no any
>    modification of code was possible (no way to build original ISO, or, at
>    least, original xapi's RPM). That was definitively not a 'free as
>    freedom', just 'open source'. Some minor stuff in /etc/xensource/scripts
>    and /opt/xensource/sm with patches, but no any significant changes was
>    possible. We actually have a huge (over 3k lines) code which simply doing
>    stuff 'around' xapi instead adding that functions to original code.
> 
>    Now we got XCP 1.6. Again there is a significant set of changes we want to
>    add (and share with others!) - but we can't, and we continue to add 'hacks
>    around'. Really, I not very happy about this and start to thinking about
>    switching to something more 'free as freedom' visualization stack.
> 
>    Lack of 'scrach your own itch' is very and very disappointing. I really
>    don't want to switch away from xapi and want to see some cooperation...
> 
>    28.02.2013 15:50, James Bulpin pishet:
> 
>      > There is no way to reproduce exact build environment without citrix's
>      guys and they are all in XenServer, not in XCP. Details of build
>      environment are closed and without that information disclose you can
>      assume XCP is not opensource, but just 'free'. (sad).
> 
>      We know this isn't ideal but we're working on fixing it at the moment.
>      Reproducing the Citrix build environment isn't practical so we're making
>      XCP/XenServer buildable in a more standard environment. More on this
>      soon.
> 
> 
> 
>      Cheers,
> 
>      James
> 
> 
> 
>      From: [4]xen-api-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>      [[5]mailto:xen-api-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of George Shuklin
>      Sent: 28 February 2013 09:01
>      To: [6]xen-api@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>      Subject: Re: [Xen-API] how to compile XCP source?
> 
> 
> 
>      We've tried few times, but gave up.
> 
>      There is no way to reproduce exact build environment without citrix's
>      guys and they are all in XenServer, not in XCP. Details of build
>      environment are closed and without that information disclose you can
>      assume XCP is not opensource, but just 'free'. (sad).
> 
>      To be precise: you can build xapi sources from git, but in very strange
>      environment with unknown version of libraries. It will be 'some binary',
>      not the original XCP's xapi.
> 
>      27.02.2013 19:46, Felix Feng pishet:
> 
>        Hi experts,
> 
> 
> 
>        I'm trying to build XCP source
>        [7]http://downloads.xen.org/XCP/61809c/sources/source-1.iso . I was
>        wondering whether or not a CentOS 5.x is a MUST build environment?
> 
> 
> 
>        For Debian/Ubuntu, is the
>        
> xapi-autobuilder([8]http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Compile_the_XCP_toolstack_from_source)
>        the only way to build XCP from source?
> 
> 
> 
>        And are there any instructions about compiling XCP/XAPI?
> 
> 
> 
>        Thanks.
> 
> 
> 
>        ------
> 
>        Regards,
> 
>        Felix
> 
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> 
> 
> 
> References
> 
>    Visible links
>    1. http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Making_XCP_easy_to_build
>    2. mailto:george.shuklin@xxxxxxxxx
>    3. mailto:xen-api@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>    4. mailto:xen-api-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>    5. mailto:xen-api-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>    6. mailto:xen-api@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>    7. http://downloads.xen.org/XCP/61809c/sources/source-1.iso
>    8. http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Compile_the_XCP_toolstack_from_source
>    9. mailto:Xen-api@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>   10. http://lists.xen.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xen-api

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