Xen project Mailing List

Hi all,

I will go through the thread and try and answer question (where they have not been answered and discussed), but will need the help of the people who actually attended and drove the discussion at the Hackathon. I merely took notes of what was said, and at times I missed things.

And no decision of any kind has been made : for this we do have a decision making process. But this thread seems to show that we do have a number of problems that need fixing. Maybe we need to crystallize this a little more.

From Jan:

> From the summary above I didn't really get what's wrong with the current 9 month cycle, which ...

I don't think this was indeed covered. I think the rationale was really covered in the thread. I also think I minuted the 2-3 weeks + 3 months wrong (which seems to have been clarified).

From Ben Guthro:

> Did you have any more info on this bullet, and the other one below Re: XenClient / VirtualComputer?

The only thing I remember was that this discussion was originally started by George and that IanC, Konrad, Stefano and Matt mostly covered it. We do seem to have a problem with PCI passthrough - Pasi's points. Maybe they recall more detail.

I also wanted to add to the point that Alex has made on serious bugs in xen vs. kvm : this gets raised regularly by Xen users when I attend conferences. And I also heard a few times now that we appear to focus more on sexy features rather than the basics. This is relatively new though: the first time I noticed was towards the end of last year. Which does not mean that this is new: it may just mean that top issues/concerns that were frequently raised before (mainly trust in the future of the project) have disappeared.

Lars

On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 9:15 AM, Jan Beulich <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

>>> On 13.06.13 at 23:03, Alex Bligh <alex@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The thing we like the second least about Xen is how long it seems to take
> to get what we count as serious bugs fixed, even in stable releases.

I think applicable bug fixes get applied to the stable branches in
quite timely a manner, at least on the hypervisor side. Hence I
can only assume that you're unhappy with the rate of stable
releases. Yet I don't think we're going to get anywhere near of
the almost weekly stable releases that get done for Linux. As
you also didn't say what expectations you really have, it's hard
to take out anything useful from that complaint.

> We like it even less if we have to find them and fix them.

But isn't that how open source projects work - everyone contributes
and fixes bugs. If you don't want to help fixing bugs, I'm afraid
there's also no good reason for you to complain they don't get fixed.

> By 'serious' I mean basic functionality not working, crashes dom0, etc.

When did we last break Dom0, and not fix it in a timely manner?

> The result of this is two-fold. Firstly, we've never (yet) been able to
> run a production version of xen which is a standard xen release. We've
> always had to maintain our own patches even on 'stable' releases.
> Frankly, this is a pain.

But if you don't contribute back your patches, how do you expect
them to get accepted/merged? Or are you saying that it's _far_
more than occasional that patches from you get entirely lost?

Jan

Re: [Xen-devel] [Hackathon Minutes] Xen 4.4 Planning