Re: 4.3 Planning: Taking stock

[Daniel Kiper <dkiper@net-space.pl>]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 11:12:48AM +0000, George Dunlap wrote:
> 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.

I am going to do that in that way.

> 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)?

Yes, go ahead.

Daniel