Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH RFC 0/2] Versioning ARM virt machine types

[Andrew Jones]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 06:42:16PM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On 23 February 2016 at 18:34, Wei Huang <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On 02/22/2016 04:14 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:
> >> My view here is the same as it has been in the past regarding
> >> adding versioned machine types for 'virt': are you (in this case
> >> Redhat) willing to stand behind it, in the sense of taking on
> >> the maintenance burden of adding new machine versions, reviewing
> >> new code contributions for issues that require changes to make sure
> >> that the old versions stay looking like the old machine, testing
> >> that old versions look right, testing cross version migration,
> >> and so on?
> >
> > I understand your concerns. Currently our in-house tree already carries
> > versioned ARM machine types, which mirror both QEMU 2.4 and QEMU 2.5.
> > Thus someone (including myself) from Red Hat shouldn't have any problem
> > of maintaining/testing it because we are already doing it downstream.
> > x86 and ppc have a similar situation.
> 
> Thanks for the clarification -- if you as a distro are already
> supporting versioned machine types downstream that's a strong
> argument for adding it upstream.

Unfortunately the word 'support' is super overloaded in this field. I'll
just quick clarify. We have a series of pre-releases for our virt stack.
Later pre-release releases are based on later QEMU, and thus we've
versioned mach-virt already. But, as they're just pre-releases, they
aren't supported in the sense that we're working bug reports against
them.

I believe our downstream versioning has driven some changes to libvirt
already, so I think it's a good time to bring the how to best version
mach-virt discussions to all the respective upstreams, despite it
currently, at least for us, being used only on pre-releases though.

Thanks,
drew