XCP-ng 8.3 updates announcements and testing

flakpyro

@stormi Updated a test machine running only couple VMs. Everything installed fine and rebooted without issue.

Machine is:
Intel Xeon E-2336
SuperMicro board.
One VM happens to be windows based with an Nvidia GPU passed though to it running Blue Iris using the MSR fixed found elsewhere on these forums, fix continues to work with this version of Xen.

Andrew

@stormi Installed on several test and pre-production machines.

XCP-ng-JustGreat

Latest version 8.3 candidate updates installed and are working fine on three-host home lab pool. Received a couple of repo errors for a certain mirror, but yum tried another mirror and it completed successfully. After updates were applied, performed live migrations between hosts with no problems and updated a Windows 11 Version 24H2 VM to the November 2024 cumulative update without problems. (VM is currently running Citrix Tools 9.3.2 without issues.)

gduperrey

Update published: https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2024/11/15/november-2024-security-update-for-xcp-ng-8-3/

Thank you for the tests!

flakpyro

@gduperrey Installed on a 2 host AMD based test pool, as well as our 5 host Intel based production pool without issue using rolling pool update. Everything migrated, updated then migrated back perfectly.

Also installed on my home server without issue.

Greg_E

Has the kernel changed to a newer version, or still 4.xx.xx?

gduperrey

@Greg_E No, the kernel version has not changed.
There is no kernel update in this update series either.

dxym

The blog(https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2024/11/15/november-2024-security-update-for-xcp-ng-8-3/) states the following:

Host reboots are necessary after this update.

However, the command output indicates:

# needs-restarting -r
No core libraries or services have been updated.
Reboot is probably not necessary.

Which one is correct?
It might be better to reboot the host, but not everyone checks the blog regularly.

gduperrey

@dxym It is always important to follow the instructions given on the forum or on the blog. In both cases, we indicate that the hosts must be restarted.
This way, we are sure that the hosts will apply the changes coming from the updates, like here changes on Xen and the Intel microcode.

stormi

needs-restarting is a tool from CentOS, which is not aware of the reality of XCP-ng. It's not even able to detect that a Xen or a microcode update requires a reboot. So, as Gaël says.