#Xen 4.2 Release Plan

Xen 4.2 Release Plan:
Since early January I have been tracking the status of work left to do before 4.2 by posting a weekly roundup of the remaining blockers and “nice to haves”. You can find these in the xen devel list archives, posted most Monday mornings.
Last week I decided that the TODO list had reached the point where it was time to start thinking about a release. I made a proposal for a release timeline which was generally agreed to be a reasonable plan.
In summary the plan is as follows (see the list posting for more details):

• 19 March — TODO list locked down WE ARE HERE
• 2 April — Feature Freeze
• Mid/Late April — First release candidate
• Weekly — RCN+1 until it is ready

The aim is to have a release around June time although as always this will be subject to the usual “when it is ready” test.
The TODO list was reposted this morning and contains the latest blockers and nice to haves.

Initial patches for #Xen ARMv7 with Virtualization Extensions applied to xen-unstable.

Initial patches for Xen ARMv7 with Virtualization Extensions applied to xen-unstable.:

Back in november we announced our effort to port Xen to the ARM Cortex-A15 / ARMv7 with virt extensions. I am very pleased to say that as of xen-unstable.hg changeset 24741:fb71a97fe339 the initial patches for this port are now part of the mainline Xen code base and will be release (albeit in highly experimental form) in the Xen 4.2 release.

The main archtectural decision which underlies this port is that it requires the ARM virtualisation extensions and has been built from the ground up to follow a hyrbid model which both makes maximum use of the hardware’s capabilities and exploits paravirtualisation where appropriate. We’ve found the virtualisation extensions to be very well thought out and easy to use which has contributed massively to our ability to get something up and running so quickly with so little effort. For example the extensions include instructions for walking each of the various page tables which you might be using as well as proving a decode of the faulting instruction when trapping to the hypervisor. These allow us to skip writing both our own page table walkers and instruction decoders — both of which are often large chunks of code which are subtle to get right.

The current state of the port is that it will boot a Linux domain 0 kernel to a command line prompt in a Cortex-A15 simulator (no actual hardware is available yet). Next on our list is to get basic Xen tools support working so that we can start work on bringing up our first proper guest.

For more information on this port of Xen please see the Xen ARMv7 with Virtualization Extensions wiki page. We also have a DevFAQ and a guide to obtaining and building the FastModels simulator platform.

Xen hypervisor ported to ARM processor - The H Open Source: News and Features

Xen hypervisor ported to ARM processor - The H Open Source: News and Features:

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Simon Crosby, the godfather of Xen, on virtualization, security and wimpy private clouds

Simon Crosby, the godfather of Xen, on virtualization, security and wimpy private clouds:

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blog.opennebula.org » Archives » OpenNebula Releases Xen Cloud Platform Integration Prototype

blog.opennebula.org » Archives » OpenNebula Releases Xen Cloud Platform Integration Prototype:

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Building OpenNebula Clouds on XCP – blog.xen.org

Building OpenNebula Clouds on XCP – blog.xen.org:

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Xen.org Update | Citrix Blogs

Xen.org Update | Citrix Blogs:

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XCP support coming to CloudStack in next release

Blog:

XCP support coming to CloudStack in the next release

By ke4qqq on Oct 13 in Open Source 0 Comments

XCP has, in a very short time, become one of the preferred hypervisors in the CloudStack community, and for good reason. XCP has a number of features that eclipse even some of the paid editions of XenServer, and all with no annual need to reacquire even the free license code.

The XCP project recently announced the release of version 1.1, which has continued to generate a lot of interest and questions about when CloudStack will support it. To keep pace with the rapid development cycle of XCP, CloudStack recently merged in code to support XCP 1.1 and that should appear in the next release of CloudStack. Of course, if you want to play with it today, you can always build from source.

The potential for XCP (and the sister Project Kronos which releases XAPI, or the Xen API, as a package that can be included in Linux Distributions) is exciting, and I hope to see XCP and Project Kronos drive a lot of the innovation around Xen and open source virtualization in the coming months.

Tags: release, cloud computing, xcp, Xenserver, Xen, Cloud

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About the author

ke4qqq

David Nalley is currently employed by Citrix as the Community Manager for the CloudStack project. In addition he's a long time contributor to the Fedora Project, where among other things he is currently serving on the Fedora Project Board. He's also contributed to in various forms to Cobbler, Zenoss, Opengroupware.org, OLPC Math4, and Sahana. He is a frequent speaker at Free Software conferences around the nation, and writes for a number of technical and open source media publications including Linux Pro Magazine and OpenSource.com

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XCP 1.1 has landed! – blog.xen.org

XCP 1.1 has landed! – blog.xen.org:

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XCP 1.1 has landed!

The XCP team would like to announce that we have released XCP 1.1. I wanted to thank community members who have tested RC1 for doing so and wanted to let you know that no significant issues have been found. Thus, we promoted the XCP 1.1 RC1 release candidate to final release status: so if you’ve already installed the RC1 release, there is no reason to upgrade.

New XCP Features
Here are some features included in XCP 1.1:

• Security updates and bug fixes
• IntelliCache: Enables you to use a combination of Shared storage and local storage caching.
• Local Storage Spans All Physical Volumes: When EXT local storage is used on a host containing multiple physical disks, the local Storage Repository (SR) now spans all the disks in a single LVM volume group.
• Reset-on-boot VM behaviour: Disks with the on-boot option set to reset, is now available for disks in any type of SR. (Previously it was only available for disks in NFS and EXT SRs.)
• Enhanced guest OS support: Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.
• For OpenStack and others: support for ebtables and other netfilter options have been added to the kernel. These options have been disabled by default, but can be re-enabled with simple sysctl commands. These are the same kernel changes that will be included the upcoming XCP 1.5 release and have been included in XenServer 6.0.
• The Xapi version override feature has been added back in. This allows users to effectively rebrand their XCP boxes as XenServer hosts, in order to work better with products such as XenCenter.

Thank you!
Thanks again to all our beta testers. And extra thanks to everyone for being exceedingly patient with our long beta period! We’re in the middle of revamping our internal build system right now. Once we finish this work, XCP releases should be easier for us to produce. This work will also allow us to produce development snapshots of XCP releases in between stable point releases, to allow people to test new features as they make it into XCP’s and XenServer’s mainline.

I hope everyone enjoys using XCP 1.1. Keep an eye out here for news on the upcoming XCP 1.5 release schedule!

New Docs!
Note that new XCP documentation has been written on the wiki: thank you to the community members who have contributed. In particular I wanted to thank Andrew Eross from Locatrix for the new XCP HowTo documents. We still need to create a nice and easy to use index for XCP docs, but in the meantime you can easily find the docs by searching for XCP.