[Pkg-xen-devel] Xen in stretch - 4.7 or 4.8 ?

[Ian Jackson]

Hi.  I was wanting an initial opinion from the Release Team, about the
Xen packages.  Currently they are in bad shape in stretch and I intend
to fix them ASAP.

The question is whether I should move to Xen 4.7, or Xen 4.8.  Xen 4.8
is currently at RC2 and seems in pretty good shape.  I think it's more
probable than not that we'll have Xen 4.8.0 by the Debian freeze date,
but this is by no means certain.  If 4.8.0 arrives after the Debian
freeze, then at the Debian freeze stretch will contain a late RC.  The
only things going into the upstream 4.8 branch after then will be
fairly important bugfixes which we would probably want to take for
stretch.

The biggest improvements in 4.8 compared to 4.7 are improvements to
ARM support, including AIUI fairly important overhauls.  There are
also changes to support the new PVH2 guest mode, which Xen upstream
are intending to ultimately replace PV with.  There are also more
minor features, and some bugfixes which upstream won't backport.

Upstream support ends as follows:

                    End of bugfix support    End of security support

  Xen 4.6 [1]             Apr 2017               Oct 2018
  Xen 4.7                 Dec 2018               Jun 2019
  Xen 4.8             May/Jun 2019 [2]       Nov/Dec 2019 [2]

[1] Currently in stretch, in bad shape, we shouldn't release with
this.

[2] Xen 4.8 support dates are not formally promised yet and will
depend on the Xen 4.8.0 release date.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Jackson <ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

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