Re: [Qemu-devel] change x86 default machine type to Q35?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Jul 05, 2017 at 10:14:23AM +0200, Thomas Huth wrote:
>  Hi,
> 
> On 05.07.2017 08:57, Chao Peng wrote:
> > 
> > Q35 has been in QEMU for quite a while. Compared to the current default
> > i440FX, Q35 is probably not that mature and not widely used, however in
> > some case, Q35 has advantages, for example, in supporting new features.
> > For instance, we have some features require PCI-e support which is only
> > available on Q35 and some others need it for EFI support. It is of
> > course not necessary to change it as the default but if more and more
> > features have dependencies on Q35 because of requiring much more modern
> > features then I think it may be worth to do so. In such case we can have
> > more people to use it and find problems we may know or not know.
> 
> Yes, IMHO at one point in time, we should switch the default machine
> type to q35. The i440FX is really quite old...
> 
> > There are certainly some drawbacks:
> > -        Compatibility: current code or script may need adjustment
> 
> That might be a real concern ... so I think a good point in time to
> switch to the q35 machine type would be when we switch to the next major
> version number of QEMU, i.e. when we switch to version 3.0. If the users
> see a new major version number, they might be more willing to accept
> such major changes (yeah, I know, we've discussed in the past that
> version numbers are just numbers ... but still, there is some kind of
> psychological aspect to this, too, I think)

Most users aren't even aware of version numbers of QEMU - they'll just
take whatever their distro has provided run it. The notion that their
latest distro version happened to pull in a "major" version instead of
previously pulling in a "minor" version is invisible to everyone,
except the minority of people who care about the low level details.

Regards,
Daniel
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