Re: [Qemu-devel] insmod virtio-blk is broken in qemu 1.0

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 12:02:59PM -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> On 12/19/2011 11:43 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >I hadn't raised it again, because I had mistakenly assumed QEMU
> >will automatically pull in the newer SeaBios release before 1.0
> >came out. I could have more aggresively bugged people on qemu-devel
> >to update SeaBios, but given your point above about not wanting to
> >rebase Seabios its not clear that would have helped sort this out
> >before 1.0
> 
> We really need to update SeaBIOS whenever there is a bug that we
> know requires an update.  Things breakdown because of one or more of
> the following reasons:
> 
> 1) User submits a patch to seabios@, Kevin applies it.  But that
> doesn't necessarily trigger anything happening in QEMU.
> 
> Ideally, the above mentioned user would submit a submodule update once (1) happens.
> 
> 2) Kevin fixes something on his own or someone else changes
> something in the broader SeaBIOS community.  That may not even be
> visible in QEMU.
> 
> Syncing right before release isn't a good strategy either because
> that means we're pulling in something that hasn't been tested
> extensively at the very tail end of our release cycle.
> 
> I would like to point out that August -> October is a pretty long
> time period for a regression like this to exist.  I think that
> really indicates that the primary problem is testing, not frequency
> of SeaBIOS updates.

One complication is that alot of us are not necessarily testing the
SeaBIOS that is in QEMU GIT. Fedora rawhide includes qemu-kvm.git
snapshots which are updated fairly frequently, but we don't use
the SeaBIOS QEMU includes. Instead Fedora includes the latest
SeaBIOS upstream release.

So Fedora 16/rawhide users would never have seen this particular
bug for longer than a couple of weeks until the fixed SeaBIOS
arrived.

Regards,
Daniel
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