Re: [Xen-devel] Clarifying the state of ARINC653 scheduler (and other components) in Xen 4.5 and beyond

[Lars Kurth <lars.kurth.xen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Alright,
if nobody is willing to come up with a definition of 
experimental/preview/supported/deprecated, I will based on what I have seen
Lars

> On 9 Jun 2015, at 10:53, Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>>>> On 08.06.15 at 22:59, <dario.faggioli@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Mon, 2015-06-08 at 14:01 +0100, Lars Kurth wrote:
>>>> On 8 Jun 2015, at 13:19, Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> In MAINTAINERS S: Supported means:
>>>> 
>>>> "Someone is actually paid to look after this.", which I think is
>>>> distinct from "This works well enough that the project is happy to
>>>> recommend it is used in production". It's a shame that Supported can be
>>>> taken to mean both things.
>>>> 
>>>> For reference Maintained is "Someone actually looks after it.".
>>>> 
>>>> Alternatively if someone can think of another way to express "paid
>>>> maintainer" we could switch to that.
>>> 
>>> And then there is of course the question what we do with ARINC653. 
>>> 
>> Not sure we actually need to do something. The status in MAINTAINERS is
>> consistent with the existing semantic, as there's actually people
>> actively looking after the scheduler (and paid to do so, AFAIK).
>> 
>> Wrt the wiki page, the best way of capturing the state of things is,
>> basing on what's in there for the other schedulers, 'Supported' there
>> too. The scheduler has a very limited scope, and is useful only in a
>> handful of situations, and that's by design. But for those situations it
>> works pretty well, AFAIK.
>> 
>> Moreover, there is people in the community providing help to interested
>> users on how to set it up (there has been a thread on xen-users about
>> this rather recently).
>> 
>> Whether we should recommend to use it in production, well, I think we
>> could, of course for those people and only for them having a requirement
>> for compliance with the ARINC653 standard, which certainly is not the
>> most common thing around.
> 
> But you understand that one primary aspect of whether something
> is to be considered supported is whether that code, if found to be
> flawed, may end up triggering security advisories? I.e. apart from
> people looking after it and people using it (or showing interest to do
> so) we also need to be convinced that the code quality is good
> enough. The situation of tmem (also marked Supported in
> ./MAINTAINERS) is the prime example of when that's not
> (recognizably) the case. And the bug report (that luckily didn't need
> to result in an XSA for other reasons) leading to
> http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2015-06/msg01018.html
> shows that the code may not have got audited from a security
> perspective.
> 
> Jan


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