[Pkg-xen-devel] Plans for buster

[Hans van Kranenburg]

On 08/23/2018 01:39 AM, Stephen Gelman wrote:
>> On Aug 22, 2018, at 6:29 PM, Hans van Kranenburg <hans at knorrie.org> wrote:
>>
>> By the way, at work, I use the packages on Stretch by just rebuilding
>> them in stretch pbuilder. So, for whoever wants to use this on Stretch,
>> I'm paying attention to the thing being able to rebuild on it all the time.
> 
> Given this, it would be cool to plan to backport xen 4.11 to stretch-backports once it makes it to buster. 

Absolutely. I would so much like to see that happen and help to provide
proper rolling releases via backports to people who have new hardware
and need the bugfixes for them etc...

Since upstream wants to ensure you can always use live migration from
the current to next (only +1 minor should be guaranteed/tested, more is
yolo) version (aka 4.10 -> 4.11), it makes sense to have a full-blown
stable-backports solution available for that (including the kernel team
doing backports, which you can use and report problems to) that makes it
possible to keep using debian stable with a minimal amount of relevant
backport packages and follow stable xen releases via debian backports.

All of this can be part of an alternative to "teh great reb00t"
maintenance scenario for a hosting provider. From experience at work, I
know that "just rebooting everyting, yes, everyting (tm)", even if it is
only once every two or three years is a major (tm) painful project.

Being able to live migrate when upgrading dom0s and dealing with the
reboots of domUs seperately is a whole different thing.

My landscape (at work) currently looks like things running around PV
style screaming to be converted to PVH, waiting for pvgrub2-pvh to happen.

However, I have no idea if we can ship it in official backports without
the qemu team things participating, because there's no way you can do
HVM without that.

Knorrie

P.S. yes, that won't fix live migration from 4.8 to 4.11, although it
might work, without any guarantees.