Open Stack

Hi Team Nova,

This is a message to alert everyone to the fact that the old hypervisor
support matrix on the wiki[1], should really be considered obsolete.

The canonical location for it going forward will be

   http://docs.openstack.org/developer/nova/support-matrix.html

That URL shows current GIT snapshot, releases will get their own URL
when the time comes.

The source for this document is part of Nova GIT in the path

   doc/source/support-matrix.ini

The docs are auto-generated from that ini file using a sphinx extension

   doc/ext/support_matrix.py

The CSS styling is in

   doc/source/_static/support-matrix.css

Some things to note here

 - The new doc was populated based on the contents of the old wiki page from
   about two months ago, so if there have been additions to the wiki in that
   time, they might not all have been captured - depends how good I was at
   figuring out changes.

 - Improvements to the content and/or HTML styling should obviously be sent
   as patches to Nova GIT in the files mentioned above, via normal Gerrit
   review practice.

 - Since it is in GIT, the support matrix is now able to record information
   per release branch of Nova. So users can be clear about what features
   their release of Nova supports, as opposed to playing guessing games.

 - The in-tree document only covers features of the in-tree Nova drivers.
   As such it does not include information about Docker or PowerKVM or
   the (now deleted) BareMetal drivers. My currently suggestion is that
   people maintaining out of tree drivers, should reuse the sphinx extension
   to format their own support matrix ini file in their local GIT repo.

   I've not deleted the wiki page, since in the short term it is the
   only place with info about Docker/PowerKVM.

 - When submitting a new virt driver for merge in Nova, you should add
   it to the docs/source/support-matrix.ini file. This clearly shows
   reviewers what feature set your initial code submission supports

   For example, the Parallels team who have been adding Parallels support
   to Libvirt for Kilo should submit a patch to update this matrix prior
   to Kilo release.

   Likewise people working on making libvirt KVM run on Arm and PPC
   should update the matrix, since it only records x86 support status
   for Libvirt currently.

 - When adding support for new APIs to existing drivers, rememeber to
   update the docs/source/support-matrix.ini file to list the new
   capability for the driver you changed.

 - If adding new public API features, consider whether to add a new
   feature line item to the docs/source/support-matrix.ini if it is
   likely users need to know about support status across drivers.

 - Against each line item feature, there is note about whether the
   feature is considered mandatory to support in all drivers. The
   current support matrix only lists 2 features as mandatory - start
   and stop of instances. Everything else was left as optional on the
   basis that at least one existing in-tree driver doesn't support
   the feature.

   It is very important to note that this is a *tentative* list. The
   decision about mandatory vs optional features is subject to change
   as it has *not* undergone detailed critique by Nova core team at
   this time. IOW, we might make more features mandatory to support
   in the future. TBD.

 - There is clear scope for making the existing feature list more
   fine grained. For example there are many different ways to configure
   block storage for guests and only a few of them are captured in the
   current support matrix. Likewise for networking, and many other
   aspects of guest configuration.


Sean has added the support matrix as a discussion item for today's
Nova meeting, to evaluate what if any changes we need to make to it
in the near term to better capture the current thoughts of Nova team
about support status.

  https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings/Nova#Agenda_for_next_meeting

So either send questions in this thread or join the IRC meeting

Regards,
Daniel

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/HypervisorSupportMatrix
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