Re: 4.3 Planning: Taking stock

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

On 24/01/13 11:16, Daniel Kiper wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 05:00:26PM +0000, 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.
>>
>> 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.
> I am going to do all work which is needed to run Xen + upstream Linux
> Kernel on EFI enabled platform. I am going to look at GRUB2 too (as
> stated eariler). I hope that this does not require a lot of work and
> relevant patches could be ready before 4.3 feature freeze.

Great!  If you could prioritize Xen booting under grub2.efi, it seems 
like that would benefit the xen.org project overall.

Shall I put you down as owner for "Xen on grub.efi", and mark it as 
"Fair" (given that you don't yet know how much work it will be)?

  -George