Xen Project Release Features/Definitions
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The definitions in this document primarily refer to the information in Xen Project Release Features or its archived version.
Definition of Support Labels
Each status value besides a ✓ or ✓ corresponds to levels of security support, testing, stability, etc., as in the following subsections. Note that format in Xen Project Release Features typically follows the following convention
- ✓ [footnote] [support label]
- ✓ [footnote] [support label]
If no support label is specified besides a ✓, the feature is normally considered Supported unless otherwise specified.
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
All of these may appear in modified form via footnotes.
Definition of the status label interpretation tags
Functionally complete
Does it behave like a fully functional feature? Yes = ✓
Does it work on all expected platforms, or does it only work for a very specific sub-case? No = ✓
Does it have a sensible UI, or do you have to have a deep understanding of the internals to get it to work properly? No = ✓
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?
If "no", anyone who finds a security-related bug in the feature will be advised to post it publicly to the Xen Project mailing lists (or contact another security response team, if a relevant one exists).
Bugs found after the end of Security-Support-Until in the Release Support section will receive an XSA if they also affect newer, security-supported, versions of Xen.
However, the Xen Project will not provide official fixes or non-security-supported versions.
Interaction with other features
Not all features interact well with all other features. Some features are only for HVM guests; some don't work with migration, &c.
External security support
The Xen Project security team provides security support for Xen Project projects.
We also provide security support for Xen-related code in Linux, which is an external project but doesn't have its own security process.
External projects that provide their own security support for Xen-related features are listed below.
