On 9/25/2021 11:27 PM, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
Unfortunately I was too quick at installing the rebuilt 4.14.3-1 and I missed trying the vanilla Debian 4.14.2+25-gb6a8c4f72d-2 with Linux 4.19.181-1. I believe this combination would have hung during reboot.
In light of what I discovered while investigating the cause of bug #994899, I would tend to think calling Debian 4.14.2+25-gb6a8c4f72d-2 "vanilla" an interesting choice of words. To me, vanilla connotes boring, uninteresting. But that version of Debian Xen, and also the current version in the stable distribution, bullseye, are not boring or uninteresting as I have studied these versions and concluded they actually are now a fork of upstream Xen's 4.14 version, since they contain patches from upstream Xen's 4.16 unstable branch to better support the Raspberry Pi 4, as noted in the changelogs of those versions. So I am adding the tag upstream, and I suggest that the Debian Xen Team notify upstream Xen that we are planning a fork of Xen to better support popular arm devices and we are already shipping a testing version of it in our current bullseye release. We could tell upstream we are willing to stop this fork if they could assist us with backporting the reworking of the xen/arm/acpi and xen/x86/acpi code that is in upstream Xen 4.16 unstable to xen 4.14. We can tell them if they are interested in what we are doing, they can take a look at the work we are doing on our public development servers (salsa). For our own users, especially in the stable version, we should make a note of this fact in a README.Debian file and place it in an appropriate place of the binary packages. We should also note that there are encouraging results with this version for improved support on arm, but some tests indicate an annoying bug causing problems shutting down Domain 0 appear to have surfaced on x86 (amd64). For details, see bugs #991967 and #994899 on the Debian Bug Tracking System. I think this is the BEST way to truly proceed in accordance with the Debian Social Policy of courtesy and cooperation with the free software projects that are available to the public in our main repositories, and to properly inform our users what we are doing in our current Xen packages for unstable, testing, and stable.
