Last week we finally crossed the last major remaining issues off the Xen 4.2 TODO list. This means that the release plan now looks like this:
19 March — TODO list locked down2 April — Feature Freeze- 30 July — First release candidate WE ARE HERE
- Weekly — RCN+1 until release
That’s right, we’ve now released Xen 4.2.0-rc1!
There’s still a couple of smaller outstanding items which we hope to resolve shortly plus a short list of known bugs. See this weeks TODO list / Release Plan posting for some details. The release notes for Xen 4.2 are still a work in progress but can be found on the wiki.
I’d like to encourage everyone to start testing now. You can get RC1 from the Xen unstable mercurial tree (in the short term the actual 4.2.0-rc1 tag will be in the staging tree until testing passes). Please report any issues which you find to the xen-devel mailing list.
In particular I would encourage everyone to test the new xl toolstack with their use cases. In Xen 4.2.0 the venerable xend toolstack will be deprecated and everyone will be encouraged everyone to move over to xl whenever possible. xl is in good shape already, has good support for the core features and is quite robust etc. However one of the factors of xend unmaintainability is that no one is quite sure what all of its features actually are! So if you suspect you are using functionality which is a bit unusual or less common then please do give xl a try and report your findings to the xen-devel mailing list so that we can attempt to resolve these issues before the 4.2.0 release.