[Pkg-xen-devel] Report: 2nd tuesday of the month!

[Hans van Kranenburg]

So, I had this idea of dedicating the 2nd tuesday of the month to
Debian/Xen since I realized that I didn't even process my written notes
from the UK Citrix visit a month ago yet.

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The day started with a really nice present in my mailbox! Juergen posted
a new series of PVH+grub patches so that we can have pvgrub2 with PVH,
also for domUs with more than 3GiB of memory. I'm eager to test them,
but didn't get to that today yet. This is the big missing link for
starting to look into switching everything from PV to PVH at work.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2018-10/msg00022.html

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Next was processing my notes from the Citrix UK visit a month ago.

I updated the "Debian/Xen microsprint, Cambridge, 11th September 2018"
TODO with some notes for all of the checkboxes and action points. I
didn't close it yet, because then it disappears, but it's not relevant
any more now:

https://salsa.debian.org/xen-team/debian-xen/issues/19

The packaging rewrite by Ian removed the majority of the (potential)
problems that we identified earlier, which is great.

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And, from the result, I created a new one. There are a few sections in
the todo list. The most important one is the first, having a clear
overview of what we need to do before Buster starts freezing.

https://salsa.debian.org/xen-team/debian-xen/issues/20

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Then, I wrote a request to get a debian-xen at lists.debian.org mailing
list and posted it:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=910673

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After this I started building the new package for Sid and Stretch. The
result of that and testing is in the message "Test report
xen_4.11.1~pre.20180911.5acdd26fdc+dfsg-2" that I just sent.

It's clear there's more work needed to fix some fallout after the blast.

Especially the live migrate issues are very worrying for me. Unreliable
live migration is a total show stopper for us at work (Mendix). This is
the area that we have been busy with during the whole past year already,
and which is the main stumble block which is seriously blocking progress
in our testing and production roll-out plans. (The unexplained problems
with Linux 4.9 before, and now a new category of problems with Xen 4.11
and latest Linux)... :@

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I spent some time while waiting for server reboots to look at the grub
translation issue.

There is a patch from ubuntu for #865086 that I didn't apply yet simply
because I want to be able to reproduce the problem and verify that the
patch fixes it.

I've been trying things with setting environment LANGUAGE etc. I can get
apt-get to show me messages in Dutch, but I have no idea how to manually
use gettext to get translated text for any of:

Debian GNU/Linux, with Xen hypervisor
Advanced options for Debian GNU/Linux (with Xen hypervisor)
Debian GNU/Linux, with Xen 4.11-amd64 and Linux 4.18.0-0.bpo.1-amd64

There are translations in the grub-common package but apparently I can't
easily find out how to use them.

If anyone knows how this works, please help.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=865086
https://salsa.debian.org/xen-team/debian-xen/commit/2138f9635c5ded2d7b694f6ed8d1b6c2e12b1389

o/

Hans