Re: [GIT PULL] remove xend for 4.5 (Was: Re: [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Exclude xend from toolstack maintainers entry)

[Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 12:18:53PM +0100, Ian Campbell wrote:
> On Fri, 2014-03-28 at 13:09 -0400, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 11:08:47AM +0000, George Dunlap wrote:
> > > On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 11:00 AM, Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@citrix.com> wrote:
> > > > On Thu, 2014-03-20 at 14:02 +0000, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > > >> On Thu, 2014-03-20 at 13:32 +0000, Jan Beulich wrote:
> > > >> >  Which reminds me - didn't you want to rip out xend
> > > >> > right away after 4.4 (which would render pointless the patch
> > > >> > here)?
> > > >>
> > > >> I still want to do it before 4.5, this is more of a short term thing
> > > >> because people were sending me patches right now.
> > > >>
> > > >> Step one of the removal is to stop osstest from testing xend, I sent a
> > > >> patch for that a week or two ago.
> > > >
> > > > That patch is now in place in the production osstest. So I propose the
> > > > following pull request (since the actual patch is nearly 3M in size,
> > > > even the diffstat here is bigger than most patches!).
> > > 
> > > On my list of dependencies for removing xend, I have the following:
> > > 
> > > * xend still in tree (x)
> > >  - xl list -l on a dom0-only system
> > >  - xl list -l doesn't contain tty console port
> > >  - xl Alternate transport support for migration*
> > >  - xl PVSCSI support
> > >  - xl PVUSB support
> > >  - xl support for vnc and vnclisten options with PV guests
> > 
> > I don't really like adding more of 'xend has this' to the list,
> 
> that's ok.
> 
> > but
> > Jan discovered that 'xend' was using the group assigment hypercall for
> > PCI devices while 'xl' is not doing that. 
> >  
> > That hypercall has certain benefits - you can use it to figure out if 
> > all of the PCI devices underneath a bridge are assigned to one
> > guest and not shared amongts the guests.
> 
> I think this is at the wishlist rather than blocker end of the spectrum,
> and probably falls under the general category of "xl pci passthrough has
> sharp edges"? Does that sound right?

Yes, they are hazardous to ones health.
> 
> Ian.
>