Re: [libvirt] Opinions on removing the old, legacy libvirt Xen driver

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 02:25:18PM -0700, Jim Fehlig wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I briefly mentioned this at an evening event during the KVM Forum / Xen Dev
> Summit, but the list is certainly a better place to discuss such a topic.
> What do folks think about finally removing the old, legacy, xend-based
> driver from the libvirt sources?
> 
> The Xen community made xl/libxl the primary toolstack in Xen 4.1. In Xen
> 4.2, it was made the default toolstack. In Xen 4.5, xm/xend was completely
> removed from the Xen source tree. According to the Xen release support
> matrix [0], upstream maintenance of Xen 4.1-4.3 has been dropped for some
> time, including "long term" security support. Xen 4.4-4.5 no longer receive
> regular maintenance support, with security support ending in March for 4.4
> and January 2018 for 4.5. In short, the fully maintained upstream Xen
> releases don't even contain xm/xend :-).
> 
> As for downstreams, I doubt anyone is interested in running the last several
> libvirt releases on an old Xen installition with xm/xend, let alone
> libvirt.git master. SUSE, which still supports Xen, has no interest in using
> a new libvirt on older (but still supported) SLES that uses the xm/xend
> toolstack. I struggle to find a good reason to keep any of the old cruft
> under src/xen/. I do think we should keep the xm/sexpr config
> parsing/formatting code src/xenconfig/ since it is useful for converting old
> xm and sexpr config to libvirt domXML.
> 
> Thanks for opinions and comments!

As a point of reference, for the QEMU/KVM driver we took the decision to drop
support for distros whose age is older than RHEL-6 (Nov 2010 release date).
Xen 4.1 came out in early 2011 IIUC, so dropping support for Xen < 4.1 is
a reasonable thing todo and consistent with what we've done for QEMU. So
ACK to that from a project support POV.

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
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