XCP-ng 8.3 updates announcements and testing

gduperrey

New security and maintenance update candidate

A new XSA (Xen Security Advisory) was published on the 8th of July, related to hardware vulnerabilities in several AMD CPUS. Updated microcode mitigate it, and Xen is updated to adapt to the changes in the CPU features. We also publish other non-urgent updates which we had in the pipe for the next update release.

Security updates

amd-microcode:
- Update to 20250626-1 as redistributed by XenServer.
xen-*:
- Fix XSA-471 - New speculative side-channel attacks have been discovered, affecting systems running all versions of Xen and AMD Fam19h CPUs (Zen3/4 microarchitectures). An attacker could infer data from other contexts. There are no current mitigations, but AMD is producing microcode to address the issue, and patches for Xen are available. These attacks, named Transitive Scheduler Attacks (TSA) by AMD, include CVE-2024-36350 (TSA-SQ) and CVE-2024-36357 (TSA-L1).

Maintenance updates

http-nbd-transfer:
- Fix missing import exceptions in log files.
- Fix a potential HA startup failure with LINSTOR.
xo-lite: update to 0.12.1
- [Charts] Fix tooltip overflow when too close to the edge
- [Host/VM/Dashboard] Fix timestamp on some charts

Test on XCP-ng 8.3

yum clean metadata --enablerepo=xcp-ng-testing
yum update --enablerepo=xcp-ng-testing
reboot

The usual update rules apply: pool coordinator first, etc.

Versions:

amd-microcode: 20250626-1.1.xcpng8.3
http-nbd-transfer: 1.7.0-1.xcpng8.3
xen: 4.17.5-15.1.xcpng8.3
xo-lite: 0.12.1-1.xcpng8.3

What to test

Normal use and anything else you want to test.

Test window before official release of the updates

~2 days.

stormi

And fixes for XCP-ng 8.2 are coming but they require more work to backport the patches.

flakpyro

@stormi

Tested on my usual Intel test servers you've seen me post in this thread in the past as well as a 2 host AMD Epyc pool,(HP DL325 Gen10) rolling pool reboot worked as expected, hosts rebooted without issue, backups and replication appear to function as usual.

Andrew

@gduperrey Installed and running on Intel systems, and Zen3 system that sees the microcode update.

gb.123

Installed fine. Didn't get a chance to deep dive and/or test features.

gduperrey

Updates published: https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2025/07/15/july-2025-security-update-2-for-xcp-ng-8-3-lts/

Thank you for the tests!

flakpyro

@gduperrey im getting the following trying to update:

yum clean metadata && yum check-update
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Cleaning repos: xcp-ng-base xcp-ng-updates
4 metadata files removed
3 sqlite files removed
0 metadata files removed
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
Excluding mirror: updates.xcp-ng.org
 * xcp-ng-base: mirrors.xcp-ng.org
Excluding mirror: updates.xcp-ng.org
 * xcp-ng-updates: mirrors.xcp-ng.org
xcp-ng-base/signature                                                                                                                                                   |  473 B  00:00:00     
xcp-ng-base/signature                                                                                                                                                   | 3.0 kB  00:00:00 !!! 
xcp-ng-updates/signature                                                                                                                                                |  473 B  00:00:00     
xcp-ng-updates/signature                                                                                                                                                | 3.0 kB  00:00:00 !!! 
xcp-ng-updates/primary_db      FAILED                                          
http://mirrors.xcp-ng.org/8/8.3/updates/x86_64/repodata/0a94f9d57be162987a7e5162b4471809af2ee0897e97cc24187077fb58804380-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTPS Error 404 - Not Found-:--:-- ETA 
Trying other mirror.
To address this issue please refer to the below wiki article 

https://wiki.centos.org/yum-errors

If above article doesn't help to resolve this issue please use https://bugs.centos.org/.

(1/2): xcp-ng-base/primary_db                                                                                                                                           | 3.9 MB  00:00:02     
xcp-ng-updates/primary_db      FAILED                                          
http://mirrors.xcp-ng.org/8/8.3/updates/x86_64/repodata/0a94f9d57be162987a7e5162b4471809af2ee0897e97cc24187077fb58804380-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTPS Error 404 - Not Found-:--:-- ETA 
Trying other mirror.
http://mirrors.xcp-ng.org/8/8.3/updates/x86_64/repodata/0a94f9d57be162987a7e5162b4471809af2ee0897e97cc24187077fb58804380-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTPS Error 404 - Not Found
Trying other mirror.


 One of the configured repositories failed (XCP-ng Updates Repository),
 and yum doesn't have enough cached data to continue. At this point the only
 safe thing yum can do is fail. There are a few ways to work "fix" this:

     1. Contact the upstream for the repository and get them to fix the problem.

     2. Reconfigure the baseurl/etc. for the repository, to point to a working
        upstream. This is most often useful if you are using a newer
        distribution release than is supported by the repository (and the
        packages for the previous distribution release still work).

     3. Run the command with the repository temporarily disabled
            yum --disablerepo=xcp-ng-updates ...

     4. Disable the repository permanently, so yum won't use it by default. Yum
        will then just ignore the repository until you permanently enable it
        again or use --enablerepo for temporary usage:

            yum-config-manager --disable xcp-ng-updates
        or
            subscription-manager repos --disable=xcp-ng-updates

     5. Configure the failing repository to be skipped, if it is unavailable.
        Note that yum will try to contact the repo. when it runs most commands,
        so will have to try and fail each time (and thus. yum will be be much
        slower). If it is a very temporary problem though, this is often a nice
        compromise:

            yum-config-manager --save --setopt=xcp-ng-updates.skip_if_unavailable=true

failure: repodata/0a94f9d57be162987a7e5162b4471809af2ee0897e97cc24187077fb58804380-primary.sqlite.bz2 from xcp-ng-updates: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.
http://mirrors.xcp-ng.org/8/8.3/updates/x86_64/repodata/0a94f9d57be162987a7e5162b4471809af2ee0897e97cc24187077fb58804380-primary.sqlite.bz2: [Errno 14] HTTPS Error 404 - Not Found

Perhaps mirrors are still syncing?

gduperrey

@flakpyro Yes, it always takes a little time for the mirrors to synchronize.

I'm getting correct feedback from the main repository (https://updates.xcp-ng.org/) with the correct updates available.

manilx

@gduperrey I wonder why now I have to run those commands on my hosts each time for the updates to show:

yum clean all
rm -rf /var/cache/yum

Not fun

Greg_E

@gduperrey

Uggg... Just after I upgraded 8.2.1 to 8.3.x and did updates. Guess I have more waiting for me for later today or tomorrow.

archw

@flakpyro
I'm good now!

flakpyro

Updated around 43 hosts without issue.

Greg_E

I'm doing the latest production level updates announced yesterday... My pool has never migrated VMs as fast as it is now.

That was migrating several at a time, moving VMs back to "balanced" at the end is moving them at about half that speed one at a time. This is more than double what I was able to do with the same hardware on 8.2.1. It looks like it is actually capping at the maximum 10gbps speeds that the x710 cards and my switch can handle, that's never happened, not even on my lab which has been on v8.3 for over a year.

(note to self, might be time to upgrade those x520 cards in the lab to x710)

Next month's Windows updates might be interesting, hope this increase holds for that process too.

manilx

This post is deleted!

manilx

said in XCP-ng 8.3 updates announcements and testing:

@gduperrey I wonder why now I have to run those commands on my hosts each time for the updates to show:
yum clean all
rm -rf /var/cache/yum
Not fun

@gduperrey Can you explain why this is happening and how to get updates showing automatically again?

gduperrey

@manilx said in XCP-ng 8.3 updates announcements and testing:

yum clean all

I can't explain it. I can't say what's going on on your system, especially with so little information.

Personally, I run the following commands all the time:

yum clean metadata ; yum update

I very rarely need to use yum clean all, and I don't remember having to do an additional rm. And yet, I run the above commands a lot during testing campaigns.

manilx

@gduperrey said in XCP-ng 8.3 updates announcements and testing:

yum clean metadata ; yum update

OK, I'll try this next time.

P.S I've updated the 2 hosts via XO all teh time from 8.3 beta. Always showed patches available in XO. Started with the previous 8.3 updates that they didn't show and I had to run those commands.

gduperrey

@manilx We recently upgraded our Koji build system. This may have caused disruptions in this recent update release yesterday, where an XML file was generated multiple times. This has now been fixed and should not happen again. This may explain the issue encountered this time, particularly with the notification of updates via XO.

Note that normally yum metadata expires after a few hours and so it should normally return to normal on its own.