Re: [Xen-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Xen 4.13 Development Update

From: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>
To: <xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org>, <jgross@suse.com>
Cc: luwei.kang@intel.com, wl@xen.org, konrad.wilk@oracle.com,
	puwen@hygon.cn, marmarek@invisiblethingslab.com,
	olekstysh@gmail.com, paul.durrant@citrix.com, JBeulich@suse.com,
	roger.pau@citrix.com, Volodymyr_Babchuk@epam.com,
	chao.gao@intel.com
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Xen 4.13 Development Update
Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2019 17:13:18 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <5fe1d431-9727-25e1-e720-6a3286a5a549@citrix.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20190906074058.21782-1-jgross@suse.com>

On 06/09/2019 08:40, Juergen Gross wrote:
> This email only tracks big items for xen.git tree. Please reply for items you
> would like to see in 4.13 so that people have an idea what is going on and
> prioritise accordingly.
>
> You're welcome to provide description and use cases of the feature you're
> working on.
>
> = Timeline =
>
> We now adopt a fixed cut-off date scheme. We will release about every 8 months.
> The upcoming 4.13 timeline are as followed:
>
> * Last posting date: September 13th, 2019
> * Hard code freeze: September 27th, 2019
> * RC1: TBD
> * Release: November 7th, 2019

Wow this has crept up suddenly...

I'm going to braindump my "needs to be done for 4.13" list.

Before code freeze:
1) Refresh and repost MSR_VIRT_SPEC_CTRL.  Still very important for perf
on AMD Fam17h hardware.
2) Put together the "skeleton set_cpu_policy" plan.  This will help to
unblock some of the CPUID/MSR work, and will allow us to take
(/backport) MSR_ARCH_CAPS support, which is very critical for perf on
Intel Cascade Lake hardware.
2a) Stretch goal.  See about getting MSR_ARCH_CAPS working.  More likely
to be early in the 4.14 dev cycle and backport for 4.13.1
3) Stretch goal.  Dust off the domain_crash() changes which have been
pending for a couple of releases now.

Blockers:
1) L1TF_BARRIER mode.  What we have currently in tree takes a perf hit
while providing 0 security and breaking the ability to build livepatches
against 4.13.  My plan here is to put it behind an off-by-default
Kconfig option.
2) Get the Sphinx docs licensed as CC-BY, seeing as this is the first
release with them in.

Misc ought-to-haves:
1) Refresh and repost the "Introduction" and "wishlist" docs.
2) Post the conversion of xen-command-line.pandoc to sphinx which I've
been carrying locally rather too long now.

This should get the sphinx docs into a state of having several useful
bits in, even though we haven't moved over wholesale yet.

I've probably missed some things, but this should do for now.

~Andrew

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