Xen Developer Email Discussion

As part of the new emphasis on exposing developer activities to the broader community, I plan to highlight a few xen-devel discussions every week on this blog to allow the community a better view of developer interaction. If you have any thoughts on this new activity please let me know.

• Stefano Stabellini submission [PATCH] libxl: make libxl_wait_for_device_model not racy – this patch solves the following issue: at the moment libxl_wait_for_device_model waits on a xenstore watch before checking the current value of the xenstore node that might contain already the value the function was looking for. This patch changes the function so that it checks the value of the xenstore node first, then waits for the watch. Vincent Hanquez responded that the watch  automatically fires when installed so this patch is unnecessary although there is general agreement among several other developers that this code makes the issue clearer than the way it works today. As of today, this patch is not pushed to any development tree.

• David Markey submssion XCP: pygrup missing ext4 support – David noted that the current XCP solution is missing ext4 support because libfsimage ext2fs-lib module is linked against libext2fs which does not have ext4 support. David proposes that XCP use the ext2fs module that comes with libfsimage which has ext4 support. Pasi noted that all upcoming distros are also moving to libfsimage with ext4 support. Michal Novotny discussed  how this is fixed in RHEL-5 by reinstalling the e2fsprogs package to the latest one although the package is renamed e4fsprogs. Michael suggests that XCP needs to do one of the following: either use the built in libfsimage ext4 support, or upgrade e2fsprogs. As of this time, I was unable to find a definitive answer to this issue.