[xen-tools-discuss] Plan for xen-tools 4.3

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

during the last months quite some bug have been reported against
xen-tools 4.2 in Debian:

  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=xen-tools

None of them was of a "release-critical" severity in the Debian sense
so none of them has been fixed for the recently released Debian 6.0
Squeeze. Nevertheless many of them are real bugs we should tackle, so
alone these validate a 4.2.1 or a 4.3 release. I try to give a more
detailed categorisation at the end of this mail.


In addition to that we (me and my coworkers) currently try to get 4.2
properly working on Debian 5.0 Lenny (aka oldstable) Dom0s to provide
4.2 also via Debian Backports. There seem to be a quite some
finetuning issues, though, so we currently don't have a state which
would be good enough for Debian Backports. Where possible, I'd like to
include results from working on this in the next release, too. (This
will also fix #609852 Please update lenny's xen-tools to support
installing squeeze)


Then there came up a idea for a new small feature, because one of my
coworkers asked "How can I generated the MAC address without actually
installing an DomU?". Currently, if no MAC address is given,
xen-create-image creates one.

My idea[1] is to split off this functionality to some script called
e.g. xt-generate-mac which gets a (not closer specified) string as
input and generated a "XenSource Inc."-prefix MAC address by default
(other prefixes probably via commandline options).

  [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=616393

Currently the generated MAC address is always the same as long as
hostname, IP/DHCP configuration and the distribution are the same.
After some discussions with my coworkers, we came to the conclusion
that nothing else than hostname makes sense for MAC address
generation, except maybe the interface number in case of more than one
interface, but that's not in yet anyway.

So I'd like to change the MAC address generation to be based only on
the hostname and possibly interface number, nothing more. This would
generate different MAC addresses than before for all cases. But I
don't think this should cause much harm with regards to backward
compatibility. But it definitely warrants a 4.3 version number
compared to a 4.2.1 version number.


Detailed plan on bug-hunting:

Should be easy to fix:

  #605203 Role script editor crashes with dash
  #611397 can't install sarge i386 on amd64 host
  #609982 btrfs support for domU creation is broken
          [Yeah, nobody really tested this...]
  #611407 --ip=auto option always fails; 'auto' doesn't match IPaddr
  	  regex

Needs some closer investigation, but should be fixable nevertheless:

  #607236 70-install-ssh: needlessly generates ssh keys, stalls
  	  xen-create-image
  #609673 creates bad domU.cfg with "root" disk not listed first
  	  (pyGrub related?).
          [Could also be related to the mount order issues, Stephane
	  and me investigated at the Debian MiniDebConf and Bug
	  Squashing Party at Paris.]
  #610837 Should support providing enabling and/or providing manually
	  IPv6 settings

To check if it still happens with 4.2, and if so, fix it once and
forever:

  #588783 Should mount /dev/pts when creating image

Needs new features or changes in default behaviour to get fixed, but still
in reach for the next release:

  #610457 no possibility to use a local security mirror for Ubuntu and
  	  Debian
  #616393 Provide a possibility to generate a MAC address in advance

Probably won't go into the next release:

  #547882 Doesn't support different netmasks per ip

No answer since my last inquiry, so I really don't know if we should
change this:

  #477238 Please, remove /domains directory creation.

Only relevant in Lenny or on Lenny DomUs, not sure if we will fix that
at all as it will be more or less obsolete in the future:

  #404508 should know about installing linux-modules packages

All other bugs are bugs from pre-4.2 times and IIRC not easy to fix:

  #495266 xen-create-image --accounts misnumbers user groups
  #547882 Doesn't support different netmasks per ip
  #578399 can't install a complete, usable instance of centos
          [maybe a rinse issue]


Anyone else has plans or wishes for 4.3? Or comments? :-)

		Kind regards, Axel
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