[Qemu-devel] Re: Cutting a new QEMU release

[Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>]

Anthony Liguori wrote:
> >While I have no problem having it long time ported to the KVM interface,
> >just declaring some quite useful and functional piece of open source work
> >obsolete and unsupported quite drastic. This work should be not be lost
> >so easily.
> 
> I think you misunderstand.  Noone is claiming that kqemu is no longer 
> being supported.  Quite rather, we're simply stating it's never been 
> supported.
> 
> It started as a binary kernel module, impossible to support within the 
> QEMU community.  While Fabrice has open sourced kqemu, it's never been 
> included in QEMU.  It's not maintained by the current QEMU maintainers 
> and not supported by the current QEMU maintainers.
> 
> It's essentially a separate project.

Yes, it's unfortunate how its history worked out.  On the face of it,
it looks like Fabrice was hoping for someone to pay for it.  Maybe
they did.  I remember a vague murmur of an attempt to make an open
source replacement for kqemu when it was still binary-only; that
didn't go anywhere as far as I remember.

Anthony: If one or more maintainers were to step up, perhaps even
begin adapting the kqemu interface to kvm's, would you be interested
in folding it in the main qemu/kvm project as an official feature?

Straw poll: who here's interested in maintaining kqemu?

I have very little time, but plenty of x86 intimate knowledge and
kernel knowledge, and have used kqemu occasionally.  I can offer my
hand as "interested a bit, not by myself".

(Also, perhaps some of the Windows / other kqemu bits might be useful
in porting kvm to Windows.  Now that we have nested kvm, those of us
who never run a native Windows host can think about testing such a thing ;-)

-- Jamie