Re: [Xen-API] Xapi Project 2.0 release

[George Shuklin <george.shuklin@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 06/02/2014 04:41 PM, Dave Scott wrote:
> 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.
Glad to hear that.

But still, how about problems with LVM patches? As far as I know there 
is a bug ugly patch over lvm2 tools in XenServer. This patch will never 
be accepted to upstream, and lack of that patch kills completely 
LVMoISCSI SR. I never saw source of ISO installator and patches for 
Centos/RHEL installers for elilo.
And, the main question: governance. Personally I think XenServer made a 
horrible mistake when adopted VHD format - and because Citrix is 
completely control of XenServer development, there is no chances to undo 
that. And Citrix is more interested in VDIs than everything else...

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