Bug#995341: release.debian.org: Xen dom0 does not power off on bullseye (stable)
On 9/29/2021 7:26 PM, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote:
Ordinarily, as I understand the process, a bug in the
stable version is first fixed in the unstable release
and then the fix is migrated (backported) to the
stable release. But it appears to me a fix in the
unstable release will not be forthcoming soon, or
it might be a different bug (see #991967, affecting the
unstable release, sid, for more details).
Another way to look at this unusual situation:
At the present time the Xen packages targeting
the unstable version are identical to the
Xen packages targeting the stable version. In other
words, either the stable version is not really stable
or the unstable version is actually stable. I argue it
is the former and somewhere along the line the
process for migrating a stable version of Xen into
bullseye broke. I have identified when the process
broke. It was when patches from unstable upstream
Xen 4.16 were migrated to bullseye even though
the upstream version of Xen for both stable and
unstable was stable upstream Xen 4.14. In other words,
the current Debian version of Xen targeting the
stable distribution is actually an unstable version
of Debian Xen that is a mixture of mostly stable Xen 4.14
and nine unstable patches from upstream
Xen 4.16. This is causing instabilities and bugs such as
#994899 and #991967 on amd64 and also likely i386.
This upload to stable fixes this by removing the instabilities
on amd64 and i386 without removing the good work
done by the Debian Xen Team improving support
for arm devices. So it is a win-win to accept this upload
to stable.
Going forward, work on Debian's unstable version
of Xen can continue with investigating and fixing
#991967 and eventually updating to a newer upstream
version, which will probably be at least Xen 4.16 which
in my tests already show that #994899 is fixed upstream
in Xen 4.16, as discussed here:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=994899#5
To quote (with corrections and clarifications) from the
aforementioned message:
I also tested the current unstable (master) branch
from Xen upstream, which is xen-c76cfad, which
(upstream) calls Xen-4.16-unstable. I tested
the current bullseye kernel (5.10.46-4) as a
dom0 on that upstream Xen-4.16 hypervisor
and did not see the bug, so this most definitely
is NOT an upstream bug.
So far all practical purposes, #994899 *is* fixed upstream
in upstream's unstable version Xen 4.16. So we should be
free to patch it in stable now.
Chuck
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