Xen 4.17 on XCP-ng 8.3!

Andrew

@stormi Great! Thanks.

Will Xen 4.17 become the standard version for 8.3 or is this a beta on top of 8.3 that will be part of the next XCP-ng version? Is Citrix supporting 4.17 as their next release or is this XCP-ng going out on their own?

I see there are several features from newer Xen that XCP-ng has already implemented in 4.13 on 8.3 but defiantly many more improvements with 4.17.

stormi

@Andrew XCP-ng 8.3 will have Xen 4.17 once it's well tested.

JeffBerntsen

@stormi said in Xen 4.17 on XCP-ng 8.3!:

I'm creating this thread dedicated to the update from Xen 4.13 to 4.17. I will update this post with instructions very soon.

I'm definitely looking forward to it and will test here, mainly on frighteningly old hardware.

stormi

It's ready: I updated the first post with instructions.

Andrew

@stormi Thanks! 4.17 Installed and running on a NUC10. Things seem to be working, but it's just a test... And for everyone who will ask... No, Windows Hyper-V server does not work (as expected).

JeffBerntsen

@stormi I have it up and running on an HP Microserver N36L. Both of my test VMs work as they did before the update. One is running Alpine Linux 3.19.1 using UEFI secure boot and the other is a Windows Server 2008 R2 setup using Citrix drivers and agent.

bufanda

Installed on a HP EliteDesg 800 G3 Mini running 6VMs Linux nad FreeBSD all iwith UEFI one Linux with vTPM so far no issues. Will keep monitoring and testing.

kait

setting it up on a dell poweredge r720 with 3 vms (2 debian 1 freebsd)
will report if i encounter any issues

caponate

Just updated to the latest on a dell T430, all seems to be working as expected.

ravenet

Testing now on ryzen 1700.

redakula

Running stable as always for a couple of days so far - homelab with 10-15 vms.

Is there anything in particular we should be testing in order to help test 4.17?

stormi

@redakula That the system works fine on your hardware with your usual load is a good test already.

Now the most motivated might try to produce before/after benchmarks, but I don't know myself exactly what kind of benchmarks would be appropriate.

kait

ive been running it for 3 days so far with no issues, everything seems to be working fine

redakula

@stormi Intel 9th gen on C242 chipset if you are keeping track of hardware.

Not 100% sure if it is related (but i believe it was working before updating) but stats are unavailable in XOfor both host and VM's. Simply says "No stats."
XO from sources and fully up to date on the latest commit.

Can anyone else check if they have stats in XO?

olivierlambert

@redakula That's a known issue that was due to 2 problems, and both are fixed for the end of the month

stormi

New updates are available in xcp-ng-lab for Xen 4.17.

Update with:

yum update --enablerepo=xcp-ng-lab

Then reboot.

Here's the changelog, from XenServer's development repository for Xen:

 * Tue Feb 13 2024 Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com> - 4.17.3-2
- De-virtualise more function pointers, based on boot time configuration
- Improve the performance of IOMMU construction for dom0
- Fix a bug with the determination of IVMD memory regions
- Fix inefficiencies with XEN_{SYS,DOM}CTL_getdomaininfo{,list}
- Fix undefined behaviour in compat_set_timer_op()
- Fix the Raw CPU Policy rescan when CPUID Masking is active

stormi

After the update, besides testing manually, there is another way you can contribute to the testing of Xen 4.17 for XCP-ng.

Run XTF: https://docs.xcp-ng.org/project/development-process/tests/#test-the-xen-hypervisor-itself
Run xen-dom0-tests: https://docs.xcp-ng.org/project/development-process/tests/#xen-dom0-tests

In order not to flood this thread with your test results:

only share the output if there's an error, or when in doubt
you can quote errors here, but if you think it's useful to share the full output, then please use https://paste.vates.tech.

If you have extra hosts you can temporarily dedicate to this, even if you don't have any VMs to run on them, you can very well take part in the testing effort by installating XCP-ng 8.3 beta2, updating, installing Xen 4.17, and then running these automated tests.

The more diverse hardware we get to test, the better.

Andrew

@stormi I already installed 4.17 before, now doing today's update yum update --enablerepo=xcp-ng-lab wants to install from both lab and base, but they conflict because yum picks base. This happens for all of the updated lab packages, not just one in the example:

---> Package forkexecd.x86_64 0:23.31.0-1.1.0.xen417.2.xcpng8.3 will be updated
---> Package forkexecd.x86_64 0:23.31.0-1.5.xcpng8.3 will be an update
Updating:
 forkexecd                                         x86_64                              23.31.0-1.5.xcpng8.3                                   xcp-ng-base                              1.7 M

https://paste.vates.tech/?f4dea5fc787301a9#6XKfAJyxkRjuLVkrJVznRJpV3x1VQVL5NE2oaRLHKWA7

Andrew

@stormi Never mind.... yum update --enablerepo=xcp-ng-lab is working now on that system...

Andrew

@stormi
HP DL360p G8 (Xeon E5-2680) XCP 8.3 Xen version 4.17.3-2

Dom0 ALL TESTS PASSED.
xtf selftest SUCCESS.
xtf all tests SKIP/SUCCESS.

Intel NUC10 (i5-10210U) XCP 8.3 Xen version 4.17.3-2

Dom0 ALL TESTS PASSED.
xtf selftest SUCCESS.
xtf HARD system freeze at test-hvm64-xsa-304. (only XCP hard lockup I have seen)
xtf With ept=no-exec-sp, all tests SKIP/SUCCESS.