Re: [Qemu-devel] Proposal for deprecating unsupported host OSes & architecutures

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 10:09:51AM +0100, Thomas Huth wrote:
> On 16.03.2017 17:52, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On 16/03/2017 16:55, Peter Maydell wrote:
> >>> IOW, I think there is a reasonable 3 tier set here
> >>>
> >>>  1. Stuff we actively test builds & thus guarantee will work for
> >>>     any QEMU release going forward.
> >>>
> >>>  2. Stuff we don't actively test, but generally assume is mostly
> >>>     working, and likely to be fixed if & when problems are found
> >>>
> >>>  3. Stuff we don't actively test,  assume is probably broken
> >>>     and unlikely to be fixed if reported
> >>>
> >>> Stuff in tier 3 should be candidate for deletion. Stuff in tier
> >>> 2 shouldn't be removed, but it might drop into tier 3 at some
> >>> point if people stop caring about fixing problems when found.
> >>> Conversely tier 2 might rise to tier 1 if CI turns up.
> >>
> >> I don't really want a tier 2. Either we support it enough
> >> to at least be able to run "make && make check" on some
> >> representative system, or we don't support it at all.
> >> Code which we have but are really reluctant to touch because
> >> we don't even test it builds (like bsd-user/) is really bad
> >> for preventing cleanups.
> > 
> > I think we should further differentiate between bsd-user/ and softmmu.
> > System emulation is just another program where we mostly compile to C
> > standard + POSIX or C standard + Win32.  There are certainly places
> > where we use Linux-specific extensions but it's not that special.
> > Neither BSD nor Solaris are particularly hard to support there.
> > 
> > On the other hand, bsd-user is extremely BSD specific, and ought to have
> > CI.  I think there should be a tier 2 for system emulation (which
> > doesn't mean that anything there shouldn't be moved to tier 3 and
> > eventually removed), but there shouldn't be a tier 2 for user-mode
> > emulation.
> > 
> > In particular, I believe that we should remove bsd-user from 2.10 unless
> > the downstream BSD port is merged back (and CI is provided).  There is
> > no point in keeping the current half-baked code without thread support.
> 
> I think you made a good point here.
> So "+1" from my side to remove "bsd-user" and "tcg/ia64" in QEMU 2.10
> or 2.11 (unless someone speaks up and provides maintainence, of course).

In the mail thread two months back Sean Bruno did suggest he might like
to just start over with bsd-user:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2017-01/msg00171.html

So perhaps someone should just ping him to see if he objects to us
deleting bsd-usr now (on off chance he's got patches nearly ready to
fix it)

Regards,
Daniel
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