Re: Xen 4.3 development update, and stock-taking

[George Dunlap <george.dunlap@eu.citrix.com>]

On 17/01/13 09:09, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>> On 16.01.13 at 18:55, George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@eu.citrix.com> wrote:
>> * Persistent grants for blk (external)
>>    owner: roger.pau@citrix
>>    status: Initial implementation posted
>>    prognosis: ?
> I think this went into 3.8-rc.

Ah, great.

>
>> * Scalability: 16TiB of RAM
>>    owner: jan@suse
>>    status: Not started
> Patches almost ready to be posted (working fine for "normal"
> mode, but working on simulating the mode we'd be in when
> having this much of memory).
>
> Prognosis: Good.

Good, I'll update that.

>
>> * Remove hardcoded mobprobe's in xencommons
>>    owner: ?
>>    status: ?
>>    prognosis: Poor.
> This was actually _promised_ to be a temporary hack, so I'd
> consider it a release blocker if nothing at all was done here.

I agree.  But I thought it would be useful *first* to have a clear list 
of where everything is.  Then when we know what's at-risk, we can decide 
which things are critical / blockers and have a call to action.

>
>> * Xen EFI boot
>>   - Signature checking for dom0 kernel / initrd?
>>   status: No owner.
>>   prognosis: Probably not for 4.4
> This is already in the tree (c/s 26262:b62bd62b2683). Nothing else
> should be necessary on the hypervisor side if the shim is to be used.
>
> But of course pv-ops Linux continues to lack EFI support altogether.

OK, so I think the description needs an update, then.  For Xen to be 
fully featured, I think it would need all of the following:
* An EFI-bootable dom0 (this should be done, right?)
* dom0 able to make use of EFI run-time services
* Xen able to use EFI boot-time services (?)
* Xen able to detect the existence of a signed Linux binary, and leave 
EFI boot-time services enabled for dom0 to use when appropriate
* dom0 able to use boot-time EFI services and disable them when done

Are any of these that should be blockers for 4.3?

  -George