XenServer Status – January 2014 [feedly]

XenServer Status – January 2014
// Latest blog entries

The release of true hardware GPU sharing and XenServer 6.2 SP1 was a strong finish to 2013 and based on the feedback from the Citrix Partner Summit a few weeks back, we really are a key differentiator for Citrix XenDesktop which fulfills one of the roles XenServer has in the ecosystem. Of course this also opens the question of how to get the sources for the cool new bits, and I'll cover that in just a little bit. Looking beyond the commercial role for XenServer, we also saw significant growth in the core project with visitors, page views, downloads and mailing list activity all up at least 20% compared to December. From the perspective of engineering accomplishments, completed work in Q4 included a move to 4.3 for the Xen Project hypervisor, a move to CentOS 6.4 with Linux kernel to 3.10, and significant work towards a 64 bit dom0, upstream support for Windows PV drivers and blktap3 for storage. All told, this is a fantastic base from which to build upon in 2014.

Speaking of foundations, as an open source project we have an obligation to our community to provide clear access to the source used to produce XenServer. Unfortunately, it's become apparent some confusion exists in the state of the project and source code locations. Fundamentally we had a miscommunication where many assumed the sources on xenserver.org and posted in GitHub represented XenServer 6.2 and that code changes which occurred in the GitHub repositories represented the XenServer 6.2 product direction. In reality, XenServer 6.2 represents a fork of XenServer which occurred prior to the creation of xenserver.org and the code which is part of xenserver.org represents trunk. So what does this mean for those of you looking for code, and for that matter test your solution with the correct binaries? To solve that I've created this handy little table:

XenServer 6.1 and prior	Source is located on citrix.com within the downloads section
XenServer 6.2	Source is located on citrix.com within the downloads section, and on xenserver.org download page
XenServer 6.2 hotfixes	Source is located within the zip file containing the hotfix
XenServer 6.2 SP1	Source is located within the zip file containing the service pack
XenServer trunk	Source is located in the XenServer GitHub repository
XenServer nightly builds	Source is located in the XenServer GitHub repository
XenCenter 6.1 and prior	Source is not available
XenCenter 6.2 and later	Source is located in the XenServer GitHub repository, and all XenCenter 6.2 versions are built from trunk
XenServer optional components	Not all optional components are open source. For components which are open source, the source will be available with the component. Note that source code from third parties may require a license from the third party to obtain source (e.g. proprietary headers)

 

So what does this mean for specific feature work, and more importantly the next major version of XenServer? If the work being performed occurs within the XenServer 6.2 branch (for example as a hotfix), then that work will continue to be performed as it always has and source will be posted with that release. The only exception to that is work on XenCenter which is always occurring in trunk. Work for the next major release will occur in trunk as it currently has, but specific feature implementations in trunk shouldn't be considered "ready" until we actually release. In practice that means we may have some proof of concept stuff get committed, and we may decide that proof of concept work isn't compatible with newer work and refactor things before the release. I hope this clears things up a little, and there is now a better understanding of where a given feature can be found.     

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