[Pkg-xen-devel] Report on the Xen BOF at Debconf 18

[John Keates]

Thank you for the report! Booting newer Windows versions with UEFI works fine (if you use OVMF), were there any specific versions or problems mentioned?
I’ll see if I can find the videos when they are uploaded, that probably is much faster to answer any questions I might have ;-)

John

> On 30 Jul 2018, at 05:11, Ian Jackson <ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> 
> We had a smallish attendance but of quite keen and engaged people.
> 
> I reported Hans van Kranenburg's work on Xen 4.11 to the BOF, although
> as it was very recent I hadn't been able to examine it myself.  Hans,
> thank you.
> 
> Much of the discussion was about speculative execution problems.  It's
> clear that the user community din't really appreciate the situation,
> and in particular, that new exploit techniques and updates are likely
> to continue to appear indefinitely.  I think it will be worth writing
> some kind of statement or briefing or polemic or something.  I'll
> think about what what that ought to look like, and/or search for an
> existing thing to refer to.
> 
> The distribution of microcode updates for spectre/meltdown mitigations
> came up.  It appears that projects like Debian are getting the new
> microcode quite late, and in this respect the fairness of particularly
> Intel's handling of the free software community was questioned.  I
> will ask my colleagues upstream if we have any leverage or influence.
> 
> We also had questions from Xen contributors and downstreams/users
> about qemu, PVH, UEFI, and support for booting newer versions of
> Windows.  Mostly I tried to answer these, as a representative of
> upstream.  I think an action point for upstream here is to consider
> how we can best present this kind of feature support information.
> 
> Some of it is in SUPPORT.md in xen.git, which is shown here
>  http://xenbits.xen.org/docs/unstable/support-matrix.html
> but perhaps the situation with Windows guest support should be written
> down somewhere on the wiki ?
> 
> I asked about the versioning of the tools, as a quick check to see
> whether that is considered valuable.  (One main use case is to allow
> reboots of a host with running guests.)  Feedback was that this is
> still an important feature.
> 
> There were a couple of questions about maintainership, including of
> the Xen packages and of the xen-tools package.  I'm currently the
> maintainer of Xen at least in stretch, although Hans has been working
> on buster and at this rate that he may well be a/the maintainer in
> buster.  The xen-tools package may be orphaned upstream, but is heavily
> used in the upstream CI, and it seems to work and be unlikely to
> break, so feeling at the BOF was that we don't think this is a serious
> difficulty.
> 
> Since no-one at the event objected, the event was video streamed,
> despite to the original programme note to the contrary.  So the video
> stream will be available from the Debconf conference video site in due
> course.
> 
> Ian.
> 
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