Xen Project Release Features/Definitions

This is a draft, that is based on what we have done in the past. The exact text will still need to be agreed formally. Once approved, this will be copied into in-tree documentation and links from here to those pages, will be created.

User-facing Support Criteria

Functionally complete:

Does it behave like a fully functional feature? Does it work on all expected platforms, or does it only work for a very specific sub-case? Does it have a sensible UI, or do you have to have a deep understanding of the internals to get it to work properly?

Functional stability:

What is the risk of it exhibiting bugs?

General answers to the above:

• Here be dragons: Pretty likely to still crash / fail to work. Not recommended unless you like life on the bleeding edge.
• Quirky: Mostly works but may have odd behavior here and there. Recommended for playing around or for non-production use cases.
• Normal: Ready for production use

Interface stability:

If I build a system based on the current interfaces, will they still work when I upgrade to the next version?

• Not stable: Interface is still in the early stages and still fairly likely to be broken in future updates.
• Provisionally stable: We're not yet promising backwards compatibility, but we think this is probably the final form of the interface. It may still require some tweaks.
• Stable: We will try very hard to avoid breaking backwards compatibility, and to fix any regressions that are reported.

Security supported:

Will XSAs be issued if security-related bugs are discovered in the functionality?

Definition of Support Labels

Rather than specify each level above, we have some short-hand labels that we use to denote general answer to the above questions.

Experimental

• Functional completeness: No
• Functional stability: Here be dragons
• Interface stability: Not stable
• Security supported: No

Tech Preview

• Functional completeness: Yes
• Functional stability: Quirky
• Interface stability: Provisionally stable
• Security supported: No.

Supported

• Functional completeness: Yes
• Functional stability: Normal
• Interface stability: Yes
• Security supported: Yes

Deprecated

• Functional completeness: Yes
• Functional stability: Quirky
• Interface stability: No (as in, may disappear the next release)
• Security supported: Yes