XCP-ng 8.3 updates announcements and testing

flakpyro

@stormi Updated both of my test hosts.

Machine 1:
Intel Xeon E-2336
SuperMicro board.

Machine 2:
Minisforum MS-01
i9-13900H
32 GB Ram
Using Intel X710 onboard NIC

Everything rebooted and came up fine. The MS-01 i test with uses i40e and intel-igc not the e1000 driver. The other machine with the SuperMicro board uses igb so im afraid i'm not much help in testing that driver.

yum commands did seem to work from the small handful i ran.

And yes, stats do indeed work again

I never noticed the issue with Server 2025 and hanging on reboot since the updates from last week. Were you able to see anything in the dump files i sent?

Greg_E

@flakpyro

Off topic, how does XCP handle the E and P cores in that 13900 machine? That was one of the considerations that made me skip these Intel processors in favor of AMD.

I'll get mine updated as soon as possible, on going work to clean out my tech room so it can get cut in half for class space. Goodbye future expansion if we need it!

Andrew

@stormi Minor issue: e1000e does not show driver version with ethtool:

# ethtool -i eth0
driver: e1000e
version:
firmware-version: 0.1-4
expansion-rom-version:
bus-info: 0000:00:1f.6
supports-statistics: yes
supports-test: yes
supports-eeprom-access: yes
supports-register-dump: yes
supports-priv-flags: yes

flakpyro

@Greg_E It seems to handle it fine, i have 2 of these systems running without issue with 8.3!

stormi

@flakpyro No, I'm waiting for more feedback from the devs. All I have from them for now is it looks like either a firmware or a passthrough issue. I don't think we have changed anything to fix it.

stormi

@Andrew Thanks for noticing that. CC @ThierryEscande

Andrew

@stormi @ThierryEscande I issued a PR for intel-e1000e to add the version for ethtool.

ph7

@stormi
My old i7 with e1000e is working fine (except the version not shoving)

olivierlambert

@Greg_E It works but it's not designed to work. I'm personally use a system like this at home (Protectli) and no issues so far after a rather intensive use.

stormi

@Andrew What does a regular linux distro output as a version for the driver? I've been told there's no version in the source code, so does it output anything?

blankOutreach

@stormi It shows the kernel version, exactly what uname -r would.

Andrew

@stormi From Debian 11:

# ethtool -i enp0s25
driver: e1000e
version: 5.10.0-34-amd64
firmware-version: 0.2-4
expansion-rom-version:
bus-info: 0000:00:19.0
supports-statistics: yes
supports-test: yes
supports-eeprom-access: yes
supports-register-dump: yes
supports-priv-flags: yes

bufanda

Updated my Lab pool consisting of 2 Nodes this morning
Rebooted master first, then slave. No issues VMs migrated between reboots.
Couldn't see any issue til now.

olivierlambert

Updates done on 1x Intel and 1x AMD host, rebooted, no visible issues.

ThierryEscande

Hi @Andrew, @ph7, @blankOutreach and others

A new release of the Intel e1000e driver is available for testing. It's a minor release that fixes the driver version reported by ethtool, no other change. Please test this update and verify that network connectivity and features that you depend on work as expected.

ph7

@ThierryEscande
Ran some tests for 20 min
Seems to work fine

[18:39 x1 ~]# ethtool -i eth0
driver: e1000e
version: 5.10.179
firmware-version: 0.13-3
expansion-rom-version: 
bus-info: 0000:00:19.0
supports-statistics: yes
supports-test: yes
supports-eeprom-access: yes
supports-register-dump: yes
supports-priv-flags: yes

Andrew

@ThierryEscande I ran the update and it's passing good data (on an older card that worked before).

Greg_E

I finally got my lab updated and the two vms started, so far so good. Stats data is present, the first time I've seen any of my hosts pull 100% CPU. Hosts are little HP T740 thin clients with AMD V1756B processors and 64GB of ram, in a 3 host pool.

Sorry I can't bring more detail, not really doing work on my XCP lab right now, and lots of shake up around tech. space at work.

stormi

So, we owe a very big thank you to everyone here for your tests and feedback. The numerous updates that were in the xcp-ng-testing repository are now officially published to everyone:

https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2025/05/26/may-2025-maintenance-update-for-xcp-ng-8-3/

But stay with us, as very soon we'll have a few more updates to test, as well as refreshed installation ISOs!

flakpyro

@stormi Installed on our 2 production pools, DR and remote sites, 46 hosts total ranging from Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Supermicro servers, no issues to report!