[ovs-dev] OpenvSwitch for Ubuntu Raring/Kernel 3.8

[Ben Pfaff]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 01:02:17PM +0000, James Page wrote:
> I'm seeking some guidance on which version of Open vSwitch to ship
> with Ubuntu Raring (13.04).
> 
> Ubuntu 12.10 ships 1.4.3 with a fairly heavy set of patches for
> compatibility with Linux kernel 3.5 so that the DKMS package remains
> usable for tunnelling etc. which Openstack heavily relies on when used
> with Quantum+OpenvSwitch.
> 
> I'd rather avoid pulling in another set of patches on top of these for
> Kernel 3.8 support as I feel that the gap between vanilla 1.4.3 and
> what's shipping in Ubuntu is going to be to great making support over
> the next 2 years much harder.
> 
> Would we be better to re-baseline on the 1.9 branch and ship with a
> preview? This looks closest to what we need - I was able to cherry
> pick a few fixes from the master branch + update the checks for the
> 3.8 kernel which produced something usable.
> 
> Also is there a timescale around shipping ovs 1.9?

We had a brief internal discussion about this today.  We recommend
version 1.9 to anyone planning a release on the basis of what Open
vSwitch has available now or in the next few months.  We should be
releasing OVS 1.9 really soon (within a week or two, I hope).  I don't
know of anything we're working on in the 1.9 branch, so it probably
won't change further barring discovery of bugs (which could just as well
get discovered after release and end up in a 1.9.x release).  It would
be perfectly reasonable to prepare for a release on the basis of the
current branch-1.9.

What I really want to discourage (even though I doubt you are
considering it) is doing anything based on current master, because
there's been a lot of big changes in internal structure and I'm sure
more bugs will be discovered there before it's really ready.