| @Adam and Fedora Testing & QA: any views on my proposal? Regards Lars
Hi all,I am going to step in here with my hat as Xen Project communitymanager. We had a discussion about this issue as part of last week'scommunity call. I CC'ed a number of stake-holders, which probablyshould have been on the thread such as ITL (which builds QubesOSon top of Fedora) and Michael A Young (the Xen package manager).First of all apologies that this issue has lingered so long. Keymembers of the community were not aware of the issues raised inthis thread, otherwise we would have acted earlier. With this inmind, please in future raise issues with me, on xen-devel@,committers@ or the Xen-Fedora package manager. The Xen Communitywould like to see Fedora running as guest: in fact it would besomewhat odd if there was a Xen-Dom0 package and guest supportdidn't work. And there are some downstreams such as QubesOS,which depend on this support.On 6 Jul 2017, at 13:45, Adam Williamson <adamwill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 2017-07-06 at 15:13 -0400, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
On Thu, Jul 06, 2017 at 11:59:01AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
Hi, folks! A while ago, Xen virtualization functionality was added to
the criteria and the validation test case set, on the understanding
that Oracle would provide testing for it (and help fix bugs as they
arose).
For the last couple of releases we really have not had any such testing
We had been doing the testing, it just that we (or rather me and
Dariof) seem to get a wind of this at the last minute. Not sure exactly
how to fix that thought.
Well, I mean, every few *days* a compose gets nominated for validation
testing, and a mail is sent to test-announce. Just check your test-
announce archives for mails with "nominated for testing" in their
subject lines, and you'll see dozens. Is this not sufficient
notification?
We discussed this at the community call and came to the conclusion thatwe can run regular tests of Fedora RC's as part of our OSSTESTinfrastructure. Ian Jackson volunteered to implement this, but thereare some questions ona) The installer (which we can handle ourselves)b) When we would trigger a test - aka is there some trigger other than thec) How would results best be reported back to FedoraApologies, I am not very familiar with how the Fedora Test group works.Is there some documentation which would help integrate what you to withthe test system of another open source project?from Oracle. On that basis, I'm proposing we remove this Final
criterion:
s/Oracle/Xen Project/ I believe?
Perhaps, it's just that it always seemed to be you doing the testing,
so they got a bit conflated :)
Can we come to some arrangement, by which such issues get communicatedto the Xen Project earlier? Aka me, xen-devel@ or committers@"The release must boot successfully as Xen DomU with releases providing
a functional, supported Xen Dom0 and widely used cloud providers
utilizing Xen."
and change the 'milestone' for the test case -
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_Boot_Methods_Xen_Para_Virt -
from Final to Optional.
Thoughts? Comments? Thanks!
I would prefer for it to remain as it is.
This is only practical if it's going to be tested, and tested regularly
- not *only* on the final release candidate, right before we sign off
on the release. It needs to be tested regularly throughout the release
cycle, on the composes that are "nominated for testing".
Would the proposal above work for you? I think it satisfies what you arelooking for. We would also have someone who monitors these test resultspro-actively.Then, there are the specific grub issues that need resolving[A1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1486002 (and a recently filed duplicate @ https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1691559) caused by [A2])[A2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1264103
[B1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1703700
The first makes it harder to boot Fedora _dom0_ (but workarounds exist).While it is unpleasant, it doesn't break the release criterion, butprobably has deterred people from testing. The second one [B1] is aboutFedora _domU_, which breaks the release criterion.Marek and Michael had a discussion about these and there was alsoa summary from Daniel.== On [A1]/[A2] ==Lack of GRUB2 multiboot2/module2 commands in Fedora/RH which does notallow you load Xen as dom0 on EFI platforms with or without secureboot. Here are some relevant snippets from the discussions:"In general both modules were dropped due to CVE-2015-5281 (grub2:modules built in on EFI builds that allow loading arbitrary code,circumventing secure boot) [A3][A4]. Of course this makes sensebecause we do not want to break UEFI secure boot. But this meansthat you cannot boot Xen dom0 on UEFI platforms. The Multiboot2protocol support is required to do that. Potentially you canuse xen.efi directly but AFAICT many people prefer to use GRUB2.The CVE issue does not exist in GRUB2 upstream. It was fixed atthe end of 2019."Is there any chance these can get upstreamed into Fedora/RH?"However, this is only one piece of the puzzle. Another is arequirement for additional set of patches for Xen which allowyou to load xen.efi instead of xen.gz using Mulitboot2. Istarted work on it last year but it is currently stalled."I have taken an action to get this resolved(aka find someone to do the work).[A3] https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2015-5281[A4] http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-5281[A5] https://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2018-06/msg01292.html== On [B1] / grub2-switch-to-blscfg ==This issue is about Fedora _domU_ and breaks the releasecriterion. And looks like, it wasn't tested at all."blscfg is okay in _dom0_ - it looks like the xen setup stillgets put in non-blscfg format, and doesn't seem to matter inHVM _domU_.""The big issue is _domU_ in PV which would need a fair amountof work in pygrub to fix properly, including reading variablesfrom grubenv and extracting details from the loader files. Thisis really something to be fixed on the Xen side ... I do keepintending to have a look at it myself though I may not get aroundto it."Instead of fixing pygrub, it would be better, more future proofand easier to "use pvgrub2 instead. To be honest, its very unclearto me why would anyone want to use pygrub, when pvgrub2 exists.pygrub is much more fragile (as it needs to re-implement aparser for 3rd-party configuration format, without stablespecification) and less secure - it does that in dom0, includingmounting domU controlled disk.That said, the pvgrub2 option also requires some work, because:- Fedora grub2 packages do not include the "xen" target platform- Non-Fedora grub2 package don't have blscfg support- If we'd talk about PVH (which isn't the case here), it requires grub 2.04, which is at RC1 and isn't packaged for Fedora yet"That would be much simpler, if blscfg was upstreamed into grub2 byFedora community members. Do you know whether the Fedora has plansto do this?In any case, I have taken an action to get this resolved(aka find someone to do the work).@xen-devel: this should probably be discussed separately, such thatwe don't flood test@fedoraproject with unnecessary traffic== In Summary ==I think we can find a way forward on the testing side. Wouldthe proposal work for you?Resolving the current blockers, this seems to have been caused by alack of communication or not understanding the impact of thegrub2-switch-to-blscfg in Fedora. In any case, we are where we are.Best RegardsLars
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