Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Deprecate '-enable-kvm' and '-enable-hax' in favour of '-accel'

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 02/05/2017 17:53, Thomas Huth wrote:
>>>
>>> What we've done before for options that have become unloved, but not
>>> harmful, is remove them just from documentation.  Grep qemu-options.hx
>>> for "HXCOMM Deprecated".  Let's do that for --enable-kvm and similarly
>>> weird sugared options.
>> Except that this provides no easily greppable way to find how to enable
>> KVM, as things stand.
> Should we then improve the description of the -accel parameter?

Yes, having a list of accelerators would be useful.  For example:

   -accel tcg[,threads=on|off]  ....
   -accel kvm
   -accel hax
   -accel qtest

>> So the first lesson should be "no deprecation
>> without documentation" (any reference to 18th century political slogans
>> is purely coincidential :)).
> Would you accept my patch if I'd remove the hunks for vl.c, i.e. a patch
> that just updates the documentation?

No, updating the documentation is pointless if you don't improve it at
the same time.

I don't like writing it so often, especially to someone who is a
relatively experienced contributor, but the common word in all these
reviews is "pointless".  What is the *purpose* of this work?

I think a valid purpose would be to improve documentation, for example.

Another would be to consolidate non-QemuOpts command-line options.  For
this, some options that are entirely internal provide interesting
grounds for improvement.  For example, "-qtest" and "qtest-log" could be
consolidated in "-qtest [chardev=]chardev,log=file".

Paolo