Re: Xen 4.21 Development Update [June-July]

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

On 07.08.2025 18:20, Oleksii Kurochko wrote:
> 
> On 8/6/25 10:12 AM, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> On 06.08.2025 09:45, Oleksii Kurochko wrote:
>>> On 8/6/25 8:05 AM, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>> Overall: There are very many items on this list, and it seems entirely 
>>>> clear to
>>>> me that not all of them will make it. I think it would be quite helpful to 
>>>> strip
>>>> down the set for 4.21 to some realistic subset. Maybe something to discuss 
>>>> on
>>>> the community call later today?
>>> Good point, lets discuss that tomorrow during the community call.
>> Oh, right, it's only Wednesday today.
> 
> I had the Xen Community Call marked at 6 PM in my calendar, so I missed it as
> it actually took place at 15:00... I'm not sure if a recording is available
> somewhere, but based on the notes:
>      Call for major work items for 4.21 or 4.22
>          Please make yourself known if you are intending to work on major 
> items
>          PDX compression.
>          FRED, AVX10, APX, and AMX support (x86)
>          Host UEFI Secure Boot
>          FF-A 1.2 Support (Arm)
> 
> I completely agree with the first point — it would be great to receive 
> feedback
> from the authors of major patch series, similar to how the team at EPAM does.
> 
> As for the other items, I assume this is a list of major work items that are
> likely to slip to 4.22, correct? From the looks of it, PDX compression and
> FRED-related work might still make it into 4.21.
> 
> I also wanted to ask this during the call, but since I missed it,
> I’ll ask here instead:
> What should be the criteria for continuing to track a patch series?
> It seems that the best approach would be to rely on feedback from the series'
> author. However, obtaining that feedback can be challenging. So perhaps the
> only practical solution is to keep tracking major items throughout the current
> release cycle and drop them at the start of the next cycle if no activity has
> taken place.
> 
> P.S.: Andrew, could you please provide a list for FRED connected patch series,
> I am tracking some of them, but wanted to be sure that I'm tracking all of 
> them.

This is possibly one of the problems: The tracking is too fine-grained. I don't
think every little piece needs tracking throughout the entire dev cycle. Close
to relevant milestones, adding certain things (like bugfixes) that definitely
want to go in for the release may make sense. But prior to that I think it would
help if things were more coarse grained, and less focused on individual patches
or patch series. (Connecting the individual items with their series would of
course be a plus, but to allow having an overview the two aspects may want
separating.)

Jan