XCP-ng 8.3 updates announcements and testing

john.c

I don’t have AMD based hosts for XCP-ng. However may I suggest an additional validation test of this change, against Debian 13 when stable is released during or following tomorrow. I recon it should work - newer Linux Kernel version 6.12 series, though can’t be sure! Best check to avoid nasty surprises.

TeddyAstie

@john.c said in XCP-ng 8.3 updates announcements and testing:

I don’t have AMD based hosts for XCP-ng. However may I suggest an additional validation test of this change, against Debian 13 when stable is released during or following tomorrow. I recon it should work - newer Linux Kernel version 6.12 series, though can’t be sure! Best check to avoid nasty surprises.

The performance fix support is related to the kernel version. All kernel >= 5.19 work with it (or that have https://lore.kernel.org/all/20220530082634.6339-1-jgross@suse.com/), this includes Debian 13.

Andrew

@gduperrey Updated and running. Single hosts were fine. No AMD testing.

Upgrading a busy pool seems to have had some odd issues with VM migration, but all seems to be running fine now. I had upgraded the pool from 8.2.1 to 8.3 last month and everything has been fine. This time (after rebooting pool master) while trying to migrate guests so I could reboot hosts got a few XO errors like:

xo:api WARN admin | vm.migrate(...) [1s] =!> XapiError: INTERNAL_ERROR(Object with type VM and id bd38ee46-2701-3022-ec61-03bf3ffbdcc9/config does not exist in xenopsd)
xo:api WARN admin | vm.migrate(...) [2s] =!> XapiError: INTERNAL_ERROR(Object with type VM and id 235de1d7-832e-f1a7-fa1c-a45877aab8f6/config does not exist in xenopsd)

It was only a few on one host. I can NOT confirm this is related to the updates as I'm not having problems now. After manually rebooting the host and stuck guests, things were ok again.

olivierlambert

Updated and enabled (but on an Intel machine so far). I think I will enable it on our prod with the new config, this won't hurt (full EPYC)

bufanda

Installed on a 2 Node pool consisting of 2
HP EliteDesk 300 G3 Mini with

1x i7 6700T & 1x i5 6500T
32GB RAM each
NFS VM SR
iSCSI VM SR
various SMB ISO SR

VMs migrated during reboot withput issues, also no issues with migration after updates completed with all nodes rebooted. Alos no issues found with VMs. Primarily AlmaLinux 9 and FreeBSD 13.

gb.123

@gduperrey
@olivierlambert

First of all ...... a BIG THANK YOU for this patch !

Tested on Minisforum AMD 7945HX based pc; and I can confirm that XCP-ng boots with ACPI PSS & C Cores as mentioned in this post and it works with both options enabled.

So excited that I have tested this only and replied before testing other things..

UPDATE :
While updating this, I actually had to do 2 updates (last stable update patch of 7 files + this one)

After this installation, GPU (Nvidia) passthrough completely seems to be broken. Before the update(s) the host had to be turnoff completely, power cable had to be removed and then replugged to reset the graphics card (which used to work as I was able to run the card); but now attaching the graphics card to VM makes the VM hang on VM boot and at times, the host is also abruptly restarted (as if someone as pressed the HW reset button).

I am not sure whether the problem is in this update or the last stable one; but graphics card reset for Nvidia ( I think it has to do with ACPI reset ) still remains a problem.

Would be great if you guys can look into this.

olivierlambert

Updated on our prod cluster, works very well (full EPYC)

Andrew

@gduperrey I updated my little AMD Ryzen 5 5600U (Zen3) and it's running great!

As for the important VM to VM network performance, using Debian 13 and iperf3 single thread, before (update not enabled) is about 7.2-8Gb/sec. After the update (xen-platform-pci-bar-uc=false) I get about 10.1-13Gb/sec. So that's about a 40-60% improvement. This brings it in line with similar small Intel systems.

I did not see any change (or problem) setting it on my small test Intel system (getting about 10.1-10.8Gb/sec).

FYI: Remember, after the config change and xe-toolstack-restart, restart the VMs!

olivierlambert

Yeah I had to stop then start the VM to enjoy the new performance. On my end, iperf (not iperf3) bring even more perf on my setup, especially with multiple threads (-P4 and -P8 gave more than 100% boost)

gduperrey

New update candidate for you to test!

A new non-urgent update is ready for user testing before a future collective release. Below are the details.

A bug was found in the Emergency Network Reset due to desynchronisation between xsconsole and XAPI. This issue prevented the Emergency Network Reset from working at all. This update includes the fixes from the upstream xsconsole project to fix it.

Maintenance updates

xsconsole
- Backport sync of network reset trigger file path with XAPI to fix emergency network reset
- Backport fix for pool.conf IPv6 to avoid IPv6 truncation

Test on XCP-ng 8.3

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

Reboot is not strictly necessary, but the xsconsole instance running on the first virtual terminal of your host won't be restarted otherwise. If you do not reboot, make sure to start xsconsole from another terminal after the update.

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

Versions:

xsconsole: 11.0.8-1.2.xcpng8.3

What to test

Normal xsconsole usage, is still useful feedback. However, if possible, the most helpful test would be performing an Emergency Network Reset through xsconsole, making actual configuration changes and verifying that they are correctly applied after reboot.

Test window before official release of the updates

None defined, but early feedback is always better than late feedback, which is in turn better than no feedback