[Pkg-xen-devel] Bug#1089033: xen: Please package xen version 4.19

[Maximilian Engelhardt]

Hi everybody,

I'm sorry for replying late, this week was quite busy for me.

On Sonntag, 8. Dezember 2024 06:38:09 CET Sean Whitton wrote:
> > The situation regarding the packages is:
> > * We have a Xen 4.19 package ready, that has been tested.
> > * ==> We need a sponsor to upload it to experimental as NEW <==
> > * We can then prepare an up-to-date 4.19 for unstable.
> > * And then... we can again continue doing the 4.17 (security-)updates
> > for stable.
> 
> Cool, I will sponsor the upload, can you confirm the repository and
> branch that you consider ready-to-go ?

I have been preparing first xen 4.18 and later xen 4.19 some time ago in the 
hope to get it into unstable and testing. However this was somehow stalled by 
waiting for review and approval from Hans. And also me failing to search for 
help in other places to get things moving, after nothing happened for a long 
time.

In agreement with Hans I have now finalized my current branch and put it 
directly in our experimental branch:

https://salsa.debian.org/xen-team/debian-xen/-/tree/experimental
(commit 0d23f70837fcd59f450dd281c224d3a06d923a09)

The current packaging state is a few month old, but I guess it's best to get 
it into the Debian archive pretty soon. We can then prepare an update to the 
latest upstream, which should not be too much work.

I did some tests to make sure what is currently in the experimental branch is 
working well. This includes:

* compiling in an updated unstable environment and check it compiles fine
* check lintian output for any severe issues with the package
* run the xen hypervisor in a qemu vm and verify xen vm creation is working
* Compile a backport to bookworm which I have been running for some month on a 
local test system using pci-passthrough without and problems

To my knowledge the following would be the next steps:

* upload xen 4.19 to experimental to pass the new queue.
* update to latest upstream and upload to unstable when suitable.
  The upload to unstable will also trigger a small transition, but usually 
just rebuilding the affected packages (kexec-tools, libvirt, qemu and 
collectd) is sufficient.
* monitor there are now issues preventing it from migrating to testing

Once this has happened we can also look into updating xen in stable again.

Thanks,
Maxi
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