[vUDS Blueprint 13.10] Server support for 12.04.3/3.8 kernel

[James Page]

Hi List

During the last 6 months, we shipped 12.04.2, the most recent point 
release for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.  This included the new hardware enablement 
kernel from quantal (3.5) which is great; however this update (which was 
opt-in) broke quite a few DKMS packages which are popular with server 
users; I specifically worked on openvswitch and iscsitarget but I'm 
aware of other impacts.

I think that we should try to deal with this more pro-actively for 
12.04.3 which will include the hardware enablement kernel from raring 
(3.8).  This has some nice features including native VXLAN support which 
will be interesting to OpenStack Havana Quantum users.

So for 12.04.3 I propose we undertake the following server team activities:

1) As soon as the HWE 3.8 kernel is available (which I think should be 
soon/already), we regression test all server related DKMS packages; we 
need a list of these - I'll start with:

iscsitarget
openvswitch

Bugs should be raise for any failures introduced by the new kernel version.

2) Fix bugs; this might actually mean introducing a new upstream version 
of a DKMS based package.

Specifically I'd like to see if we could introduce a new openvswitch 
stable release; 1.4.x is going to get extremely distro patch heavy to 
fully support the 3.8 kernel (which makes me very uncomfortable), 
whereas 1.9.0 (the next stable release) already supports up to 3.8. 
This might mean introducing a parallel 1.9.0 package alongside the 1.4.x 
package we already have.

The objective of this work is to ensure that server users have a well 
documented and smooth upgrade path to using the 3.8 hardware enablement 
kernel on Ubuntu 12.04.

Anyone want to add more packages to that list to test/fix?

Cheers

James

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