Re: Is QEMU's vmxnet3 still being used?

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2021 at 03:42:23PM +0200, Thomas Huth wrote:
> 
>  Hi all,
> 
> I recently noticed that we have quite a bunch of tickets against the vmxnet3
> device in our bug trackers, which indicate that this device could be used to
> crash QEMU in various ways:
> 
>  https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues?state=opened&search=vmxnet3
> 
>  https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu?field.searchtext=vmxnet3

IIUC, all except 3 of those bugs, are issues from the device fuzzer.

It is nice that we find those, but if we don't consider this a device
targetted at virtualization use cases, I don't think they're a reason
to remove the device.

> Having hardly any knowledge about this device and its usage at all, I wonder
> how much it is still used out there in the wild? If there are still many
> users of this device, is there anybody interested here in helping to get
> these crashes fixed in the near future? Otherwise, should we maybe rather
> mark this device as deprecated and remove it in a couple of releases? What
> do you think?

We've got countless NIC models in QEMU most of which have minimal users,
are possibly buggy, not actively maintained, but exist to support
non-virtualization use cases. We've especially not had "how many users
are there" as a criteria for acceptance or removal of a device.

Regards,
Daniel
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