XCP-ng 8.3 updates announcements and testing

[jr-m4]

Updated both test-pools: old-xcp-dev & new-xcp-dev

Backups seem to be working fine. But I'm noticing some warnings now (See below). However, these can very well be the result of clumsy and crude troubleshooting with fixing the previous test-release symptoms.

Dashboard/Health doesn't report any issues. And I'm not seing issues with the VMs in their running state.
Backups are seemingly clearing HealthChecks as well.

I will update this post in a living matter. So to not spam the forum-thread with many small posts.

Symptom 1:

Update 1:
So the only way I could "solve" the issue, was to delete all of the backups for the VM in question. Afterwards it started behaving as expected. I haven't found anything else problematic so far.

[dinhngtu]

@acebmxer Hello, could you look into the xen and kernel logs for errors?

[acebmxer]

@dinhngtu

Here are the extracted Xen hypervisor, Dom0 kernel, and toolstack/storage manager logs tracking the exact window of the NFS storage deadlock on Oct 27 between 13:00 and 15:00.

During this window, xe task-list was completely blank, and user VMs went into an uninterruptible B H state (turning into zombie D P H domains upon an xl destroy attempt). Physical hardware interfaces showed zero errors or discards via ethtool.

Looking closely at crash_window_SMlog.log, there is a clear locking deadlock right at the start of the backup run (13:00:38):
"Failed to lock /var/lock/sm/96fd7d5a-1985-80be-5776-6ace7f651a41/sr on first attempt, blocked by PID 86371"

It looks like the parallel multi-stream VHD storage exports/NBD operations lock-contended the SR control handles so badly that the underlying sm/blktap layer deadlocked entirely.

I have attached the full log bundle containing:

1. xen_hypervisor.log (Xen ring buffer / xl dmesg)
2. crash_window_kernel.log (Dom0 kernel events from /var/log/kern.log)
3. crash_window_SMlog.log (Storage manager tracks from /var/log/SMlog.1)
4. xapi_crash.log (Toolstack logs from /var/log/xensource.log.1)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uCnWXArfgyvS1gPl3mViUl8G1-DBOGzD?usp=sharing - due to file size and type i could not upload here. So i posted it on my google drive.

[anthoineb]

@acebmxer Can you share the full kern.log.1 from yesturday? And is there a PID blocked in kernel mode and which one? Can you give us a tap-ctl list output for example?
The "Failed to lock" message is a normal behavior, it should retry later.

[acebmxer]

@anthoineb
Since I had to physical power cycle to clear the I/O block and recover the host, the live kernel state and any active blocked PIDs from the window of the deadlock were cleared upon reboot.
Checking the host right now, there are currently no processes sitting in an uninterruptible sleep (D) state, and tap-ctl list shows the standard operational mappings for the running VMs:

# tap-ctl list
    5175    0    0        vhd /var/run/sr-mount/4991d4aa-ed84-599b-7d19-97f2f943a366/8d3ce0d6-7d4d-40b0-a99f-09daab8d55e1.vhd
    5720    1    0        vhd /var/run/sr-mount/4991d4aa-ed84-599b-7d19-97f2f943a366/1c200822-5a23-4afa-93cd-d0d89c076191.vhd
    6941    2    0        vhd /var/run/sr-mount/4991d4aa-ed84-599b-7d19-97f2f943a366/0fac203e-4740-4f95-a78c-a3630e591e76.vhd

# ps aux | awk '$8 ~ /D/'
(Returned empty)

Got it regarding the lock retry behavior in SMlog—thanks for clarifying that component. I am pulling the full un-truncated kern.log.1 from yesterday to add to the Google Drive folder so you can inspect the historical kernel call traces right when the backup stream hit the wall.

I have uploaded the raw kern.log.1 file directly to the shared folder.

Let me know if you want to add the exact file name context anywhere else in the message.

[acebmxer]

Last night I finished migrating to new to me cisco 25gb switch. Other changes I made was remove an ISCSI SR I was not utilizing and an NFS SR. Also migrated all vms to newly created QCOW2 NFS SR (in XO) and migrated all vms to the new SR. Checked that NBD and CBD were enabled in the backup job. I ran a full backup and it completed successfully.

Just to be sure I decided to re-install xcp-ng 8.3 on both host and re-apply the recent version of the updates. Ran delta backup and it passed.

I dont believe i missed anything in between last failed backup and issue i posted. Maybe I has having issues with the previous 10gb switch that were not visible with out taken deeper look?

If there is something specific you would like for me to check to test. But starting from clean slate / new switch seems to have helped?

[Emmanuel V]

@acebmxer said:

I have uploaded the raw kern.log.1 file directly to the shared folder.

From that log it seems that just before the reboot your NFS server wasn't responding, which that explain that your guests were freezed. Maybe that was coming from your previous switch ?
Please let us know if any new issues arise.

[lmolina]

New xapi update in xcp-ng-testing for the next XCP-ng 8.3 LTS maintenance update

We've just published a new xapi package in the xcp-ng-testing repository:

xapi: 26.1.21-1.2.xcpng8.3 -> 26.1.21-1.3.xcpng8.3

It reverts an upstream commit (released to XCP-ng's testing as 26.1.21-1) that introduced a regression, which was found by Veeam. This package will be part of the official maintenance update that will be published as expected tomorrow.

Thanks again to all the testers who helped with this milestone.

[olivierlambert]

And kudos to VEEAM for the feedback

[lmolina]

Thank you everyone for your tests and your feedback!

The updates are live now.

Note that the update includes an additional kernel security update. Another vulnerability was disclosed recently, we will provide provide the update soon. Checkout the blog post for detailed information: https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2026/11/03/november-2026-security-and-maintenance-updates-1-for-xcp-ng-8-3-lts/