SRU Minor Release Exception for Ceph

[James Page]

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Hi Technical Board

I'd like to apply for a Minor Release Exception for the Ceph package.

Background
- ----------

Ceph was included in Ubuntu main during the 12.04 release cycle; since
then upstream Ceph have started maintaining LTS releases of Ceph;
Quantal shipped with the 'argonaut' LTS release and Raring will ship
the 'bobtail' LTS release.

Ceph provides massively scalable object and block storage on commodity
hardware; it integrates closely with OpenStack (Ceph forms part of the
regular CI testing we do of OpenStack) and is a key part of the High
Availability reference architecture for Ubuntu Openstack deployments.

Having a MRE for Ceph will ensure that users of Ceph receive timely
critical updates to this software.


Upstream Change and Release Policy
- ----------------------------------

Upstream have a policy for accepting changes into the LTS release
branches which includes:

  - Back-porting of any critical bug fixes (crashes, data loss, etc)
  - Minor usability items that are low risk

Commits are peer reviewed as part of the normal development process
and are signed to signify both the developer and review (see [0] for
examples).

LTS release updates are made after some time has passed (to allow
testing) or if a particularly critical bug needs to get out to users.

Updates to LTS releases are numbered with a minor point release

   Argonaut: 0.48.1, 0.48.2, (0.48.3 released but pending SRU)
   Bobtail: 0.56, 0.56.1, 0.56.2


Upstream Regression Testing
- ---------------------------

The upstream Ceph regression suite is a mix of comprehensive
functional tests (API coverage, etc.), stress workloads (tools like
dbench, iozone on fuse, kernel cephfs, kernel rbd, inside qemu; rados
bench, rest best, etc.), and stress workloads + cluster thrashing
(random restarts of server daemons and data rebalancing).  The full
set is defined at [1].

The QA suite is run against the Argonaut/Bobtail branches nightly to
hunt for low-frequency problems.  Everything should be tested
regularly, and all but the most recent patches have been tested over
and extended period of time.

Results are published via email to the ceph-commit mailing list (see
[2] for examples).


Ubuntu Ceph Testing
- -------------------

As previously mentioned, Ceph forms part of the OpenStack testing that
we do on a per commit basis of core OpenStack projects during the
Ubuntu/OpenStack development cycle; Ceph is also tested alongside
OpenStack SRU's for Quantal/Folsom and for updates into the Ubuntu
Cloud Archive for Precise/Folsom.

In addition, we are currently setting up regular testing of Ceph
'standalone' in multi-node configurations to support more in-depth
testing of ceph itself.  This will include basic smoke testing of key
components to start with and may expand to include executing upstream
regression tests on the packages we publish/propose for inclusion in
the Ubuntu archive.


Proposed SRU Approach
- ---------------------

SRU updates for Ceph in Ubuntu will be aligned to the associated LTS
release of Ceph:

    12.10 -> Argonaut 0.48.x
    13.04 -> Bobtail 0.56.x

Ubuntu will only use the released version of updates and will not pull
directly from the upstream VCS.

Proposed packages will be prepared, uploaded and tested both
standalone and in-conjunction with OpenStack (following the
methodology detail above) as part of the standard SRU verification
process for packages with MRE's.

I hope this information gives the technical board sufficient
confidence that Ceph is worthy of a minor release exception for SRU
activity.

Thanks

James

[0] http://github.com/ceph/ceph/commits/stable
[1] http://github.com/ceph/ceph-qa-suite
[2]
http://lists.ceph.newdream.net/pipermail/ceph-commit-ceph.newdream.net/2013-February/thread.html

- -- 
James Page
Ubuntu Core Developer
Debian Maintainer
james.page at ubuntu.com
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