Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH VTPM v3 03/10] Remove old vtpm support from xm

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2012-11-19 at 15:06 +0000, Matthew Fioravante wrote:
> On 11/19/2012 09:39 AM, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > On Mon, 2012-11-19 at 13:50 +0000, Matthew Fioravante wrote:
> >> Well I think you could keep the original removal patch and just not
> >> apply this one if you don't want to mess with xm and xend.
> > The original one was the one which effectively (indirectly) removed the
> > xend feature though (unless somehow vtpm still works in xend after
> > that?)
> It doesn't work in xend after the big removal patch because the files 
> xen tries to read will no longer exist. The user can specify vtpm 
> devices for xm but the results will be unpredictable. If the user uses 
> xm on domains without vtpm everything works like before.
>
> The difference is that the xend and xm code have not been touched. This 
> means we have much lower but non-zero chance that xend/xm was somehow 
> broken by the removal. The last thing anyone here wants to do is solve 
> bug reports on deprecated xend/xm because of a change to the code. That 
> being said I'm pretty confident about my vtpm feature removals from xm 
> and did some preliminary testing. Still, theres no way to be 100% sure.

My question in this thread is whether it is ok to remove the feature of
using vtpm with xend in this release, not whether the risk of changing
xend here is worth it etc.

As I said a few posts back: being deprecated and unmaintained is
different to actively removing features, which is what we effective did
with the patch which removed the vtpm process model stuff. We want to be
sure this is actually an ok thing to be doing -- i.e. are we pulling the
rug out from under someone prematurely.

Based on Pasi's reply it seems like no one is using the tpm stuff with
xend, so we are fine.

> >>   The original
> >> patch doesn't touch xm or xend and just removes the vtpm and
> >> vtpm_manager code. The only reason I'm more inclined to remove all of
> >> the old vtpm stuff is because its going to be confusing for users
> >> grepping through the tree trying to figure out how to use vtpm.
> > Yes, we should either do all or nothing.
> >
> > Ian.
> >
> >
> 
> 



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