[Pkg-xen-devel] Bug#991967: Simply ACPI powerdown/reset issue?

[Chuck Zmudzinski]

On 9/25/2021 11:27 PM, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
>
> Unfortunately I was too quick at installing the rebuilt 4.14.3-1 and I
> missed trying the vanilla Debian 4.14.2+25-gb6a8c4f72d-2 with
> Linux 4.19.181-1.  I believe this combination would have hung during
> reboot.
>
>

In light of what I discovered while investigating the cause of
bug #994899, I would tend to think calling
Debian 4.14.2+25-gb6a8c4f72d-2 "vanilla" an interesting
choice of words. To me, vanilla connotes boring,
uninteresting. But that version of Debian Xen, and
also the current version in the stable distribution,
bullseye, are not boring or uninteresting as I have
studied these versions and concluded they actually
are now a fork of upstream Xen's 4.14 version, since
they contain patches from upstream Xen's 4.16 unstable
branch to better support the Raspberry Pi 4, as noted
in the changelogs of those versions.

So I am adding the tag upstream, and I suggest that
the Debian Xen Team notify upstream Xen that we
are planning a fork of Xen to better support popular
arm devices and we are already shipping a testing
version of it in our current bullseye release. We could
tell upstream we are willing to stop this fork if they
could assist us with backporting the reworking of the
xen/arm/acpi and xen/x86/acpi code that is in upstream
Xen 4.16 unstable to xen 4.14. We can tell
them if they are interested in what we are doing, they
can take a look at the work we are doing on our
public development servers (salsa).

For our own users, especially in the stable version,
we should make a note of this fact in a README.Debian
file and place it in an appropriate place of the binary
packages. We should also note that there are encouraging
results with this version for improved support on arm,
but some tests indicate an annoying bug causing
problems shutting down Domain 0 appear to have
surfaced on x86 (amd64). For details, see bugs #991967
and #994899 on the Debian Bug Tracking System.

I think this is the BEST way to truly proceed in accordance
with the Debian Social Policy of courtesy and cooperation
with the free software projects that are available to the
public in our main repositories, and to properly inform
our users what we are doing in our current Xen packages
for unstable, testing, and stable.