Re: [Xen-API] Xapi Project 2.0 release

[Dave Scott <Dave.Scott@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi George,

On 2 Jun 2014, at 14:13, George Shuklin <george.shuklin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 06/02/2014 03:59 PM, Jon Ludlam wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> It's about time we had a release!
>> 
>> There has been a huge amount of effort been spent over the last year or
>> so since we joined the Linux Foundation, and we're almost at the point
>> where the master branch of the xapi-project repositories can be used to
>> manage VMs in several different environments. So the main goal of this
>> release is that it works without source change on XenServer, CentOS 6.5
>> and Ubuntu 14.04. Note that this will be a source only release, as with
>> standard xen-project releases.
>> 
>> What we need to do is agree as a community what we need to do before we
>> hit the release button. We had a good starting discussion at the Xen
>> Hackathon last week, which I'll summarise here:
>> 
>> * Needs to pass 'exercise.sh' tests on Ubuntu 14.04 and CentOS 6.5 (via
>> buildroot packages).
>> * On XenServer, we can exploit the Citrix internal tests (nightly and
>> stress), which need to pass with 'reasonable' rates.
>> * All OCaml libraries must be available in opam - either through
>> xapi-project/opam-repo-dev or (preferably) the standard opam repository.
>> * Need to be able to bypass xcp-networkd taking over the management of
>> the networking on the host.
>> * Documentation! We need at least installation, basic usage, and how to
>> contribute, including build instructions.
>> 
>> So, if anyone else has any suggestions for what needs to be done before
>> release, please reply and we'll gather together a list of requirements.
>> 
>> Also, we'll need to track the todo list. Anybody have any preference for
>> where to do this? wiki.xenproject.org? Github issues?
>> 
>> 
> I don't want to sound to skeptical, but after about 5 year of deep work with 
> xapi, I was really disappointed by Citrix VS opensource relationship. 
> XenServer was and is not libre. There is source code but there is no way to 
> rebuild original ISO from those sources. Decisions were made purely in-house 
> sole by Citrix, and published opensource version (xapi packages) were broken 
> beyond repair (and were removed from repository).

I agree that the inability to rebuild the ISO from sources is a big problem. 
We’ve been working on this slowly over the past year and have now reached a 
point where the ‘master’ branch of xapi (and associated tools) should build on 
a modern Linux distro. Since there are a set of libraries we depend on we’ve 
created this repo:

https://github.com/xenserver/buildroot

— it contains “spec” files for all these dependencies. If you fire up a CentOS 
6 or an Ubuntu trusty box you should be able to clone that repo and type

./configure.sh
make
make install

I’ve switched over to using this as my primary development environment now 
since it’s the most convenient way (especially combined with a client 
hypervisor like virtualbox on a laptop). Note that it builds the latest 
bleeding-edge version of the code, so it’s not production-ready yet.

I also agree that our previous attempt to publish open source packages weren’t 
really usable. The old version of the code had so many dependencies on a 
customised CentOS distro that the packages needed a very large patch queue to 
build. The patch queue created effectively a fork of the code that we couldn’t 
afford to maintain. Merging these patches into the ‘master’ branch has taken 
about a year but is done now (more or less).

Therefore I think one of the “xapi 2” release criteria should definitely be 
“all the portability patches have been merged” so that clean packages can be 
created.

I hope this helps,
Dave Scott


_______________________________________________
Xen-api mailing list
Xen-api@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xen.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xen-api