[Pkg-xen-devel] Report on the Xen BOF at Debconf 18

[Ian Jackson]

We had a smallish attendance but of quite keen and engaged people.

I reported Hans van Kranenburg's work on Xen 4.11 to the BOF, although
as it was very recent I hadn't been able to examine it myself.  Hans,
thank you.

Much of the discussion was about speculative execution problems.  It's
clear that the user community din't really appreciate the situation,
and in particular, that new exploit techniques and updates are likely
to continue to appear indefinitely.  I think it will be worth writing
some kind of statement or briefing or polemic or something.  I'll
think about what what that ought to look like, and/or search for an
existing thing to refer to.

The distribution of microcode updates for spectre/meltdown mitigations
came up.  It appears that projects like Debian are getting the new
microcode quite late, and in this respect the fairness of particularly
Intel's handling of the free software community was questioned.  I
will ask my colleagues upstream if we have any leverage or influence.

We also had questions from Xen contributors and downstreams/users
about qemu, PVH, UEFI, and support for booting newer versions of
Windows.  Mostly I tried to answer these, as a representative of
upstream.  I think an action point for upstream here is to consider
how we can best present this kind of feature support information.

Some of it is in SUPPORT.md in xen.git, which is shown here
  http://xenbits.xen.org/docs/unstable/support-matrix.html
but perhaps the situation with Windows guest support should be written
down somewhere on the wiki ?

I asked about the versioning of the tools, as a quick check to see
whether that is considered valuable.  (One main use case is to allow
reboots of a host with running guests.)  Feedback was that this is
still an important feature.

There were a couple of questions about maintainership, including of
the Xen packages and of the xen-tools package.  I'm currently the
maintainer of Xen at least in stretch, although Hans has been working
on buster and at this rate that he may well be a/the maintainer in
buster.  The xen-tools package may be orphaned upstream, but is heavily
used in the upstream CI, and it seems to work and be unlikely to
break, so feeling at the BOF was that we don't think this is a serious
difficulty.

Since no-one at the event objected, the event was video streamed,
despite to the original programme note to the contrary.  So the video
stream will be available from the Debconf conference video site in due
course.

Ian.