<![CDATA[XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available!]]>Hello to everyone.

The RC (Release Candidate) release of XCP-ng 8.2 is available right now 🚀 .

Stability status

Our internal tests have not revealed any major bugs. Community feedback during the beta phase was positive.

We expect the RC phase to be quite short (around two weeks), so don't wait too much or you will not be able to help us test it!

Long Term Support (LTS)

XCP-ng 8.2 will be our first LTS release.

Help us make it rock-solid through your tests!

What changed

Here are the main changes since XCP-ng 8.1. Changes since the beta are in bold characters.

XCP-ng 8.2 is based on the open source components of Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 (https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-hypervisor/whats-new.html).

Base components:

  • Xen 4.13.1 + patches
  • Kernel 4.19 + patches

Citrix announces:

  • Support for SLES 12 SP5 and Ubuntu 20.04 added
  • Support for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 removed. They may still work, but are not supported officially nor tested anymore by Citrix. Consider upgrading.
  • Maximum host RAM raised to 6 TB and maximum number of logical processors per host raised to 448 CPUs.
  • Support for installing TLS certificates on hosts (see https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-hypervisor/hosts-pools.html#install-a-tls-certificate-on-your-server)
  • TLS 1.2 protocol enforced for HTTPS traffic, and between XCP-ng components. Support for legacy SSL mode and TLS 1.0/1.1 protocols have been removed.

Other changes:

  • Bug fixed for hosts configured with DHCP. xcp-networkd used not to send the hostname along with the DHCP request. We contributed a fix to the xcp-networkd package, that was included in Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 and thus in XCP-ng 8.2 (note: packages with that fix are also available for XCP-ng 8.0 and 8.1 in the xcp-ng-testing repository).
  • Backup restore fixed for UEFI hosts. This upstream bug that our community had found and that we reported to Citrix teams has been fixed by them.

Changes specific to XCP-ng:

  • Support for Intel IceLake and CometLake CPUs.
  • Reimplementation of UEFI VM support : See dedicated section below for details.
  • New storage drivers: ZFS, GlusterFS, CephFS... and other changes. See dedicated section below for details.
  • The updated Xen brings support for Core Scheduling. We added support for changing the host configuration through the XAPI and contributed it upstream. See dedicated section below.
  • Guest tools ISO: Citrix doesn't provide a guest tools ISO anymore in Citrix Hypervisor. They replaced it with downloads from their internet website. We chose to retain the feature and still provide a guest tools ISO that you can mount to your VMs. Many thanks to the XAPI developers who have kept the related source code for us in the XAPI project, rather than delete it.
  • OpenFlow support in the SDN controller: support added out of the box for Xen Orchestra to leverage it. The related code is being contributed upstream to the XAPI project.
  • We replaced Citrix's gpumon package, not built by us, by a mock build of gpumon sources, without the proprietary nvidia developer kit. See dedicated section below
  • Alternate kernel updated to version 4.19.140.
  • Intel's e1000e driver updated to version 3.8.4 in order to support more devices
  • rsyslog synced from latest CentOS 7.8 security and bugfix update because several memory leaks have been patched. Please give special attention to the logging system during your tests..
  • Additional packages:
    • ZFS updated to 0.8.5
    • zstd updated to 1.4.5
    • glusterfs 8.1 added to the repositories
    • New additional driver package: r8125-module
    • Alternate driver package intel-igb-alt updated to version 5.4.6

Reimplementation of UEFI VM support

The component that handles UEFI variables for VMs, varstored, was redistributable but not open source. So we had to implement our own, named uefistored.

Since the component was entirely rewritten, we ask the community to give special attention to UEFI VM tests.

Support for Secure Boot in VMs will also arrive soon.

New storage drivers: ZFS, GlusterFS, CephFS... and other changes

We added three new experimental storage drivers: zfs, glusterfs and cephfs.

We also decided to remove the sm-additional-drivers package (that only contained the xfs SR driver) and include all SR drivers by default, including experimental ones. However, we do not install all the dependencies on dom0 by default: xfsprogs, gluster-server, ceph-common, zfs... They need to be installed using yum for you to use the related SR drivers.

zfs

We already provided zfs packages in our repositories, but there was no dedicated SR driver. Users would use the file driver, which has a major drawback: if the zpool is not active, that driver may believe that the SR suddenly became empty, and forget all VDI metadata.

So we developed a dedicated zfs SR driver that checks whether zfs is present before drawing such conclusions.

glusterfs

Use this driver to connect to an existing Gluster storage as a shared SR.

cephfs

Use this driver to connect to an existing Ceph storage through the CephFS storage interface.

xfs

Use this driver to create and use an XFS SR.

  • Required dependency: xfsprogs
  • Documentation : to be written. There's nothing special about it, it works exactly like the ext driver, but uses xfs instead of ext4 as a filesystem.

Core Scheduling

The updated Xen in XCP-ng 8.2 brings support for Core Scheduling.

As you probably know, Hyper Threading defeats all mitigations of CPU vulnerabilities related to side-channel attacks. That's why it was required to disable it as part of the mitigations. The reason is that with Hyper Threading enabled you can't protect a VM's vCPUs from attacks originating from other VMs that have workloads scheduled on the same physical core.

With Core Scheduling, you now have another solution: you can choose to leave Hyper Threading enabled and ask the scheduler to always group vCPUs of a given VM together on the same physical core(s). This will remove the vulnerability to a class of attacks from other VMs, but will leave the VM processes vulnerables to attacks from malevolent processes from within itself. To be usedonly with entirely trusted workloads.

How to enable it:

  • The latest version of Xen Orchestra, released at the same time as XCP-ng 8.2 RC, now offers a way to change the scheduling mode for a host.
  • You can also enable it manually by adding sched-gran=core to Xen's command line parameters in grub.cfg and reboot. See Xen's documentation.

gpumon's mock build (tests with nVIDIA GPUs required)

gpumon is an opensource component that can't be built without the appropriate proprietary nvidia toolkit. It is supposed to be only used for nvidia vgpus, which we don't support (proprietary stuff too). We already tried to remove it from XCP-ng in 8.1, however you may remember than we discovered, after the release of XCP-ng 8.1, that the XAPI would not manage to start without it on systems that have nVIDIA GPUs.

This time, we chose another approach: we built a mock version of gpumon (working, but giving fake statistics about the GPUs), so the binary is present on XCP-ng and the XAPI is happy enough with it to start in presence of an nVIDIA GPU.

However, there still is a risk that the XAPI would try to use gpumon later, not only during the startup process, so we need users with nVIDIA GPUs to install XCP-ng 8.2 and test it in various situations.

How to upgrade from previous releases

Since XCP-ng 8.2.0 is a minor release, both upgrade methods are supported:

  • From the installation ISO
  • From command line using yum (from XCP-ng 8.0, 8.1 or 8.2 beta only!)

Refer to the upgrade howto.

Downloads:

It's a good habit to check your downloaded ISO against the SHA256 sum and for better security also check the signature of those sums. Although our mirror redirector does try to detect file changes on mirrors, it's should always be envisioned that a mirror (or in the worst case our source mirror) gets hacked and managed to provide both fake ISOs and SHA256 sums. But they can't fake the signature. See https://xcp-ng.org/docs/mirrors.html#security.

After the installation, stay updated

Run yum update regularly. We'll fix bugs that are detected regularly until the final release. Subscribe to this thread (and make sure to activate mail notifications in the forum parameters if you want them): we'll announce every important update to the RC here.

What to test

Everything and anything! A community effort to list things to be tested has been started at https://xcp-ng.org/docs/develprocess.html#tests.

In addition, we ask you to give special attention to:

  • UEFI VM support
  • Logging (rsyslog update)
  • The new storage drivers
  • Hosts with nVIDIA GPUs

Report or ask anything as replies to this thread.

Feedback is always useful, both about successes and failures.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/3769/xcp-ng-8-2-0-rc-now-availableRSS for NodeSat, 10 Oct 2026 17:16:33 GMTFri, 30 Oct 2020 14:13:02 GMT60<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 20:46:16 GMT]]>Great news! Thanks for the feedback 🙂

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/60553https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/60553Thu, 30 Mar 2023 20:46:16 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 20:42:48 GMT]]>@olivierlambert I just wanted to point out how I solved this issue. It happened to me when I had a host kicked from a pool while the host was offline and I manually re-added it. Long story I was remote and didn't want to reinstall via IPMI. What I did after joining the pool and seeing that no iSCSI IQN information was showing either in the general page in xcp center or via this

xe host-list uuid=<host uuid> params=other-config

I left the pool and re-added via XOA. I think I ran into it with a bad join and leaving the re joining rebuilt all of the appropriate configuration files.

All the best and massive kudos for such a great product.
-Travis

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/60552https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/60552Thu, 30 Mar 2023 20:42:48 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Sun, 27 Dec 2020 17:45:05 GMT]]>@r1 said in XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available!:

@jmccoy555 said in XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available!:

CephFS is working nicely, but the update deleted my previous secret in /etc and I had to reinstall the extra packages and recreate the SR and then obviously move the virtual disks back across and refresh

Were you not able to attach the pre-existing SR on CephFS? Accordingly, I'll take a look in the documentation or the driver.

No look. I ended up with a load of orphaned discs with no name or description, just a uuid so it was easier to restore the backups.

I guess this is because the test driver had the CephFS storage as a NFS type, so I have to forget and then re attached as a CephFS type which I guess it didn't like! But its all correct now so I guess this was just a one off moving from the test driver.

Anyway all sorted now and back up and running with no CephFS issues! 🙂

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/34781https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/34781Sun, 27 Dec 2020 17:45:05 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Thu, 10 Dec 2020 10:05:03 GMT]]>@deoccultist To limit the maintenance work, we're not diverging from what Citrix Hypervisor does unless this brings significant value, and they still install dom0 on ext3.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/34263https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/34263Thu, 10 Dec 2020 10:05:03 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Thu, 10 Dec 2020 00:42:15 GMT]]>I see that installing XCP-ng 8.2.0 will create ext4 storage repositories by default. Why isn't dom0 also ext4?

Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 ext3 18G 2.2G 15G 13% /
/dev/sda5 ext3 3.9G 20M 3.6G 1% /var/log

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/34252https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/34252Thu, 10 Dec 2020 00:42:15 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 13:00:20 GMT]]>@jmccoy555 you're right, I've fixed my post.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33661https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33661Mon, 23 Nov 2020 13:00:20 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 12:54:01 GMT]]>@stormi said in XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available!:

yum update uefistored

I could only get it (uefistored-0.2.6-1.xcpng8.2.x86_64) to update by yum update uefistored --enablerepo=xcp-ng-testing

But it has done the trick. No toolstak restart or reboot needed either.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33660https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33660Mon, 23 Nov 2020 12:54:01 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 12:59:50 GMT]]>@jmccoy555 said in XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available!:

@stormi Just tried a restoring a backup from yesterday and still no luck. Also I can not reproduce the successful copy I thought happened the other day so I can only assume I booted a VM that was on the host prior to the upgrade to 8.2 last time when I thought it worked. At least it appears to consistently not work 😖

Ping something across if you want it testing.

An update candidate is now available that should fix that backup restore / VM copy issue.

Install it with:

yum clean all --enablerepo=xcp-ng-testing
yum update uefistored --enablerepo=xcp-ng-testing

I don't think a reboot is needed, maybe not even a toolstack restart. If you don't see a better behaviour with the update, then maybe try first a toolstack restart and then a reboot.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33655https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33655Mon, 23 Nov 2020 12:59:50 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Wed, 18 Nov 2020 15:56:41 GMT]]>@r1 Good question, I don't know!! 😖

I'll probably find out when I update my main host shortly.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33482https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33482Wed, 18 Nov 2020 15:56:41 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Wed, 18 Nov 2020 15:15:40 GMT]]>@jmccoy555 said in XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available!:

CephFS is working nicely, but the update deleted my previous secret in /etc and I had to reinstall the extra packages and recreate the SR and then obviously move the virtual disks back across and refresh

Were you not able to attach the pre-existing SR on CephFS? Accordingly, I'll take a look in the documentation or the driver.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33479https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33479Wed, 18 Nov 2020 15:15:40 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Wed, 18 Nov 2020 15:04:47 GMT]]>@stormi said in XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available!:

XCP-ng 8.2 officially released https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2020/11/18/xcp-ng-8-2-lts/

And, of course, many thanks to all the pre-release testers!

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33478https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33478Wed, 18 Nov 2020 15:04:47 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Wed, 18 Nov 2020 14:44:31 GMT]]>@gskger said in XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available!:

Just a quick follow-up on my last post on restoring backups from a 8.1 to a 8.2.0RC pool.

Successfully tested restoring Linux VMs (Debian 9/10) and Windows 10 VMs (but no UEFI) from 8.1 to 8.2. Tried newly created ("plain") VMs and production VMs (but not all). So apart from that one odd VM, backup and restore works on my homelab / playlab 👍 .

We're still debugging this VM startup issue and will fix it as soon as possible.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33477https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33477Wed, 18 Nov 2020 14:44:31 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Wed, 18 Nov 2020 14:43:56 GMT]]>XCP-ng 8.2 officially released https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2020/11/18/xcp-ng-8-2-lts/

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33476https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33476Wed, 18 Nov 2020 14:43:56 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Sun, 15 Nov 2020 12:26:18 GMT]]>Just a quick follow-up on my last post on restoring backups from a 8.1 to a 8.2.0RC pool.

Successfully tested restoring Linux VMs (Debian 9/10) and Windows 10 VMs (but no UEFI) from 8.1 to 8.2. Tried newly created ("plain") VMs and production VMs (but not all). So apart from that one odd VM, backup and restore works on my homelab / playlab 👍 .

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33391https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33391Sun, 15 Nov 2020 12:26:18 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Sun, 15 Nov 2020 11:31:07 GMT]]>I am a bit out of my knowledge zone here, so please excuse me if I post something unrelated or obvious.

EDIT - it looks like only this VM has a problem when restored from the 8.1 pool to the 8.2.0RC pool (good pick 😒 ). Did some more restores and those restored fine 🤔.

Restored the plain backup of a Debian 10 9 VM (based on the Debian 9 Template) from my homelab (DELL R210 II, Xeon E3-1270 V2, 32GB RAM, 8.1 fully patched) to my playlab (DELL Optiplex 9010, i5-3550, 16GB RAM, 8.2.0RC fully patched). My homelab and playlab have different (Synology) NFS SRs connected. I am using XO from source (xo-server 5.70.0, xo-web 5.74.0) to manage my homelab and playlab pool.

Restore was sucessfull and the VM does spin up after about 2min, but with some issues during boot:

[    0.764806] vbd vbd-5696: 19 xenbus_dev_probe on device/vbd/5696

followed by

Gave up waiting for suspended/resume device

and

[***   ] A start job is running for dev-disk-by\x2duuid-7b8f0998[uuid like string].device (8s / 1 min 30s)

and finally (after 1min 30s)

[ TIME ] Timed out for dev-disk-by\x2duuid-7b8f0998[some uuid, see above]
[DEPEND] Dependency failed for /dev/disk/by-uuid/[some uuid, see above]
[DEPEND] Dependency failed for SWAP.

The VM finally starts and is fully working but does the above after every reboot. fdisk -l shows the expected drive/partition/swap. Most likely related to the somewhat different host?

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33384https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33384Sun, 15 Nov 2020 11:31:07 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 16:49:36 GMT]]>@stormi Just tried a restoring a backup from yesterday and still no luck. Also I can not reproduce the successful copy I thought happened the other day so I can only assume I booted a VM that was on the host prior to the upgrade to 8.2 last time when I thought it worked. At least it appears to consistently not work 😖

Ping something across if you want it testing.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33361https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33361Fri, 13 Nov 2020 16:49:36 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 14:34:10 GMT]]>@jmccoy555 We think we managed to reproduce the issue. I'll let you know about the outcome.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33346https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33346Fri, 13 Nov 2020 14:34:10 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Fri, 13 Nov 2020 13:02:58 GMT]]>Updates are available on the 8.2 repositories for the recent "Platypus" security vulnerability.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33340https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33340Fri, 13 Nov 2020 13:02:58 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Thu, 12 Nov 2020 15:51:58 GMT]]>@stormi

uefistored-0.2.5-1.xcpng8.2.x86_64

Yep, the backup is just a 'backup'.

I will try creating a new back up of the same VM on 8.1 and then restoring on that 8.2 but it might take a while as the disk is 64GB.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33314https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33314Thu, 12 Nov 2020 15:51:58 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Thu, 12 Nov 2020 13:59:09 GMT]]>@jmccoy555 And also can you detail the backup setup so that we can try to reproduce? Not sure if it matters, but is it a plain backup, CR, DR, etc.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33308https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33308Thu, 12 Nov 2020 13:59:09 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Thu, 12 Nov 2020 13:57:54 GMT]]>@jmccoy555 Just to be sure, what's the output of rpm -q uefistored?

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33307https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33307Thu, 12 Nov 2020 13:57:54 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Thu, 12 Nov 2020 13:50:41 GMT]]>@stormi When someone mentions you already set to Notification and email..... odd.

Right just as a double check I restored the same backup to XCP-ng 8.1 and it boots fine. Restored it again to XCP-ng 8.2 and it doesn't boot. Copy the same VM from 8.1 to 8.2 and its fine. So it looks like there's something funny going on with restoring backups on 8.2 made with 8.1.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33306https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33306Thu, 12 Nov 2020 13:50:41 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Wed, 11 Nov 2020 13:41:50 GMT]]>@jmccoy555 the forum software defaults to not notifying users by e-mail. I dislike that default but I think it may be related to GDPR and such. You can change that setting in your profile.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33270https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33270Wed, 11 Nov 2020 13:41:50 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to XCP-ng 8.2.0 RC now available! on Tue, 10 Nov 2020 23:01:53 GMT]]>@stormi Hummm strange I didn't get a notification.

Anyway, the Copy worked, it booted, updated some drivers and all is good.

Back to the backup / restore..... Its a backup made and restored with XO, if that's that you mean??

dynamic min = dynamic max = static max were all changed and set to 6GB so don't think that would be an issue.

I will try a new backup (on XCP-ng 8.1, xo-server 5.70.0, xo-web 5.74.0) and restore of the VM that I used for the Copy and see if that works.

I have no idea of the XO versions used to make the previous backup, but they would have been up to date at the time in April.

edit: The recent backup restored fine. It's not an issue for me but I guess if older backups don't work it could be for others.

]]>https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33250https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/33250Tue, 10 Nov 2020 23:01:53 GMT