Re: [GIT PULL] remove xend for 4.5 (Was: Re: [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Exclude xend from toolstack maintainers entry)

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

On 03/31/2014 12:56 PM, Matt Wilson wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 12:18:53PM +0100, Ian Campbell wrote:
>> On Fri, 2014-03-28 at 13:09 -0400, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
> [...]
>
>>> I don't really like adding more of 'xend has this' to the list,
>> that's ok.
>>
>>> but
>>> Jan discovered that 'xend' was using the group assigment hypercall for
>>> PCI devices while 'xl' is not doing that.
>>>   
>>> That hypercall has certain benefits - you can use it to figure out if
>>> all of the PCI devices underneath a bridge are assigned to one
>>> guest and not shared amongts the guests.
>> I think this is at the wishlist rather than blocker end of the spectrum,
>> and probably falls under the general category of "xl pci passthrough has
>> sharp edges"? Does that sound right?
> Probably. There are other areas that are mightily sharp as well. They
> might not be blockers for the project to remove Xend code from the
> tree, but they'll be blockers for adoption of newer releases that
> don't include Xend.
>
> Another for the list is AER handling. That's only implemented in Xend
> now [1].

Well, given that AER was not mentioned 6 months ago when this came up, 
it seems that keeping xend in tree is a blocker for people actually 
asking for things to be added to xl.

I think as Ian said, it's time to "tear off the plaster" (plaster == 
band-aid, for those in the US).  If that means people don't migrate to 
4.5, but actually report their requirements so that they can move to 
4.6, it will be worth it in the long run.

  -George