Xen Project quietly announced five years of support for all releases
As Citrix slips out a preview of Xen Server 9, the release that brings it back to the V12N mainstream
The Xen Project has decided to support all releases of its flagship hypervisor for five years, and one of the first beneficiaries of the change is Citrix, which has delivered a preview of XenServer 9 – the release that will take the product back into the mainstream virtualization market.
We’re a bit late with this news because the sources buried it in obscure places.
The Xen Project’s announcement appeared on the xen-devel mailing list, a forum in which developers discuss deeply technical matters. It took six days before a project participant cross-posted it to xen-announce, the list for announcements.
Enough of our griping: The announcement states that the project’s Committers and Core Maintainers decided to update the Xen Project stable branch support policy “to better align with common industry expectations for long-term security maintenance.”
The project previously provided around 1.5 years of full support for new releases, then security-only support until three years after a release.
The new scheme, which applies starting with last year’s Xen 4.20, provides full support for three years, and security support until five years after release.
The project has also decided to provide security-only support up to a total of five years from first release of versions 4.17, 4.18, and 4.19.
The announcement post says the project chose this scheme to avoid labelling any single version a long-term support release.
“While the motivation aligns with traditional LTS goals, using LTS terminology can imply that only selected releases receive extended support. Our aim is consistent, predictable security support across all releases,” the announcement states, adding that this scheme “strengthens Xen’s position in embedded and automotive use cases, while keeping the stable and security maintenance effort sustainable and avoiding changes to release cadence.”
But the post also says the new policy is a baseline, and the project’s participants “will actively monitor its impact on the stable and security maintenance effort.
“If experience shows this model to be unsustainable or otherwise unworkable, the Committers and Core Maintainers reserve the ability to revise the policy with minimal disruption.”
One beneficiary of the Xen Project’s new policy is XenServer, the Cloud Software Group spin-out that plans to re-enter the market for general purpose hypervisors after years ago retreating to serve only Citrix’s own products.
The outfit named its new product “XenServer9” in July last year, and quietly announced a preview of the product three weeks ago.
A What’s New document lists the following “core enhancements” to the platform:
- NUMA Optimizations
- Host Secure Boot
- Driver Multi-Versioning
- Improved Host Network Name Handling
- Updated Xen Hypervisor (v4.20)
- Dom0 Kernel Upgraded to 6.x
- New base Operating System for the Control Domain
- GFS2 SRs Now Use Corosync3
An overview of the new release teases “a stream of frequent and easy-to-apply updates, which enable you to consume new features and bug fixes at the earliest possible juncture” in XenServer 9.
“You must apply all available updates periodically,” the document foreshadows. “As a result, the behavior and feature set in XenServer 9 can change.”
The Register has over the last two years repeatedly asked Citrix and XenServer for a briefing on product direction and strategy, without success. ®