[Qemu-devel] Versioned machine types for ARM/non-x86 ? (Was Re: [PATCH v4 0/2] ARM: add 'virt' platform)

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Aug 05, 2013 at 12:18:10PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> This patch series adds a 'virt' platform which uses the
> kernel's mach-virt (fully device-tree driven) support
> to create a simple minimalist platform intended for
> use for KVM VM guests. It's based on John Rigby's
> patches, but I've overhauled it a lot:

On x86, we've long had versioned machine names, so that we can
make changes in future QEMU releases without breaking guest ABI
compatibility. AFAICT, the problem has basically been ignored
on non-x86 platforms in QEMU. Given the increased interest in
ARM in particular, should we use the addition of this new 'virt'
machine type, as an opportunity to introduce versioning for
ARM too. eg make this machine be called 'virt-1.0.6' and then
have 'virt' simply be an alias that points to the most recent
version.

Regards,
Daniel
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