XCP-ng 8.3 betas and RCs feedback 🚀

Houbsi

Greetings,

i have 8.3 running on my MS-01, it's working fine.

I upgraded my network setup with a pfsense VM and some VLAN's (still work in progress).
But, when i open my pfsense VM i'm getting this regular message:

xenstore: could not write path attr/eth1.2/ip

the 1.2 is my VLAN2 on this interface. Is this a known issue/bug? If you need some logs, then ping me

bufanda

@Houbsi Did you setup the pfsense VM according to the guide?
https://docs.xcp-ng.org/guides/pfsense/

fatek

This post is deleted!

fatek

This post is deleted!

Anonabhar

OMG! I have just noticed that on the latest beta of 8.3 the Garge Collector gives a percentage of completion in XO(a) "Tasks" and estimation of time to completion!

THANK YOU!! THANK YOU!! THANK YOU!!!

stormi

To be fair, this feature was developed by XAPI developers at XenServer, as far as I remember

That's a benefit of open source.

olivierlambert

But the display inside XO and the time left computation is done by XO

Anonabhar

Actually, another cool feature I just noticed is that I am now able to take snapshots of my Windows 11 VM's with vTPM attached.. So.. The day is just getting better and better..

I havent tried doing a backup / export yet.. I think that if it worked, I would be overwhelmed with to0 much good news for a single day and faint LOL

olivierlambert

IIRC, that should work now

stormi

Indeed.

archw

Any updates coming for 8.3.? It seems like 8.2 had a slew come out last weekish. No biggie...all is well....just curious.

stormi

Yes, big update coming for 8.3

archw

@stormi
Cool...look forward to it!

gb.123

Hello @stormi @olivierlambert

Is there any real performance difference between installing XCP-NG host on BIOS mode vs installing it on UEFI mode? (Not the VMs, I mean the host itself)

Is there any benefit of installing xcp-ng using uefi, considering we can still have uefi VMs even if we install the host in BIOS mode... correct ?

bufanda

@gb-123 I don't see the relevance of performance. It's in both cases the same software running it's just diffrent how a boot is handled and UEFI has some more security features to ensure the OS running on the hardware is authentic where as in BIOS malware can easily overtake the OS or tamper with the OS.

In normal operation you wouldn't see performance diffrence in my opinion.

jivanpal

@gb-123 Using BIOS for a hypervisor generally complicates things related to disk and partition management, since a BIOS machine boots from an MBR-formatted disk, and MBR does not directly support drives greater than 2TiB. For a hypervisor, the main benefits of UEFI are:

support for booting from GPT-formatted drives (which thus can be larger than 2TiB);
power management (which is generally better in a UEFI-native OS than one being booted in CSM (a.k.a Legacy BIOS) mode; and
Secure Boot, which you can use to ensure that the OS being booted is cryptographically signed by an OS vendor that you trust.

See here for a more detailed comparison of BIOS and UEFI. The comments about Fast Boot aren't relevant here.

I personally have XCP-ng installed in UEFI mode and then run all of my VMs in BIOS mode, because I want those benefits of UEFI on the host system, but don't want all of my guests/VMs' boot disks to have the overhead of an EFI System Partition.

stormi

Also note that support for installing on legacy BIOS firmware will likely be removed in a future release, so better select UEFI by default. In XCP-ng, this will still be supported, but there's a deprecation notice in the installer.

gb.123

@bufanda @jivanpal

Thank you soooo much for your valuable answers !

@stormi

Thanks for letting me know about the deprecation. I missed seeing it in XCP-Ng 8.3 Beta 2 while I was testing it using the ISO install method.
I believe there is no 'upgrade' path from BIOS to UEFI? ( I would need to completely re-install the host again... right ?)

Does XCP-ng have the option of secure boot when installing from iso? (I am not talking about the Guest VMs here)

jivanpal

@gb-123

I believe there is no 'upgrade' path from BIOS to UEFI? ( I would need to completely re-install the host again... right ?)

That is correct, and the installation documentation mentions this:

WARNING
NEVER switch from UEFI to BIOS (or vice-versa) after you installed XCP-ng. Stick to the mode that you chose during the install.

Does XCP-ng have the option of secure boot when installing from iso?

Not yet, though that feature seems to be tracked on GitHub here and mentions a talk discussing the scope of the problem (YouTube video). Unfortunately, it looks like there hasn't been any progress on this in the last 2 or 3 years.

stormi

I just published the last big update before the release of the XCP-ng 8.3 Release Candidate. The last pre-release before the final release.

Now is the best time to test thoroughly.

The changes contain both the result of the work of XCP-ng developers, and a rebase on the latest updates of the XenServer 8 release when appropriate.

Main highlights:

Rebased on XenServer 8 + updates published since the release
We enriched the API in order to let Xen Orchestra give you feedback about the status of Secure Boot in your UEFI VMs and updated the Secure Boot documentation
- Xen Orchestra feature 1: Warn before UEFI VM creation if Secure Boot is on but the pool is not setup for SB
- Xen Orchestra feature 2: Display accurate Secure Boot status and allow to fix a VM's UEFI certs
- Both will be included in the next Xen Orchestra release, which is currently planned for the end of this week.
Security updates: curl, Intel and AMD microcode, OpenSSL, openvswitch, sudo, xen
Installer: support for upgrading from 8.3 alpha/betas is back.
More python tools ported to python3.
Alternate "debugging" kernel updated to version 4.19.316.
Optional netdata package updated to versionn 1.44.3.
New optional driver package mlx4-modules-alt which provides the LTS 4.9 version of the MLX4 drivers, used by older ConnectX cards.
XO Lite updated to version 0.2.3:
- [Pool/Dashboard] In the Storage usage card, DVDs are no longer taken into account
- [Header] Add link to XOA when XOA is detected on the pool
- Add german translation (based on the contribution made by @borzel.

Packages details (detailed changelog available by following the links)

Reboot after update