Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 3/3] cirrus: mark as deprecated

[P J P]

  Hello Dan, all

+-- On Thu, 25 Oct 2018, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote --+
| On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 10:52:56AM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
| > While being at it deprecate cirrus too.
| > 
| > Reason (short version): use stdvga instead.
| > Verbose version:
| >     https://www.kraxel.org/blog/2014/10/qemu-using-cirrus-considered-harmful
| 
| 
| I don't debate the points in the blog post above that stdvga is a
| better choice, but I don't think that's enough to justify deprecating
| cirrus at this point in time, because when it then gets deleted it
| will break way too many existing deployments.
| 
| We need to socialize info in that blog post above more widely and
| especially ensure that apps are not using that by default. I don't
| see it being viable to formally deprecate it in QEMU any time soon
| though given existing usage.

To note, IMO there are other devices/sources in QEMU which are potential 
candidates for deprecation, similar to adlib etc. It'll help if we could 
device a process to deprecate/remove such code base. Other than maintenance it 
invariably also becomes source of security issues.

Ex.(similar to Fedora) we could announce such candidate on qemu-devel list and 
after review over a period of say a month, candidate will be 
deprecated/expunged. (thinking aloud)

Thank you.
--
Prasad J Pandit / Red Hat Product Security Team
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