Re: 4.3 Planning: Taking stock

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

On 23/01/13 17:00, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>> On 23.01.13 at 17:52, George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@eu.citrix.com> wrote:
>>> * Xen EFI feature: dom0 able to make use of EFI run-time services
>>>
>> Daniel Kiper is already working on this, but has just started.  The issue
>> (as I understand it) is that if there are systems where the ACPI tables are
>> only discoverable via EFI, then Xen+pvops will not be able to boot if pvops
>> doesn't have EFI run-time support.  The following version of Xen won't come
>> out until probably Q2 2014, and won't hit distros probably until 6 months
>> after that.
>>
>> Given that, what do we think is the likelihood of such systems cropping up
>> in that timeframe?  If the answer is anything other than "very low", I
>> think that as a strategic measure, this one is probably important enough to
>> slip the schedule a little bit if necessary.
> Except that this ought to be marked (external) in the first place:
> The hypervisor support is all there (otherwise our kernels wouldn't
> have been successfully booting on EFI for well over a year), and
> hence this work shouldn't really have any impact on the schedule.

Ah, right -- sorry, I misunderstood the situation.  As long as the Xen 
side is there to use as soon as the functionality is ready, I think 
we're probably fine.

> The one feature here that requires work in our tree is to be able
> to boot via grub.efi (irrespective of how little I personally like that);
> I'm not sure Daniel was also planning to look into that part.

Do you think not having this for 4.3 will be a potential problem for Xen?

  -George