From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:42223) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gMwRT-0003ab-26 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 14 Nov 2018 09:46:56 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gMwRN-0005eX-Fe for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 14 Nov 2018 09:46:54 -0500 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:26909) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1gMwRL-0005bR-M8 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 14 Nov 2018 09:46:49 -0500 From: Markus Armbruster References: <20181114123643.24091-1-marcandre.lureau@redhat.com> <871s7nstle.fsf@dusky.pond.sub.org> Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2018 15:46:39 +0100 In-Reply-To: (Thomas Huth's message of "Wed, 14 Nov 2018 14:33:32 +0100") Message-ID: <874lcjra28.fsf@dusky.pond.sub.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH for-3.2 00/41] RFC: slirp: make it again a standalone project List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Thomas Huth Cc: =?utf-8?Q?Marc-Andr=C3=A9?= Lureau , renzo@cs.unibo.it, Jan Kiszka , rjones@redhat.com, qemu-devel@nongnu.org, stefanha@redhat.com, samuel.thibault@ens-lyon.org Thomas Huth writes: > On 2018-11-14 13:59, Markus Armbruster wrote: >> Marc-Andr=C3=A9 Lureau writes: >>=20 >>> Hi, >>> >>> Based-on: https://people.debian.org/~sthibault/qemu.git/ slirp branch >>> >>> This series goal is to allow building libslirp as an independent librar= y. >>> >>> While looking at making SLIRP a seperate running process, I thought >>> that having an independent library from QEMU would be a first step. >>> >>> There has been some attempts to make slirp a seperate project in the pa= st. >>> (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2017-02/msg01092.html) >>> Unfortunately, they forked from QEMU and didn't provide enough >>> compatibility for QEMU to make use of it (in particular, vmstate >>> handling was removed, they lost git history etc). Furthermore, they >>> are not maintained as far as I can see. >>> >>> I would propose to make slirp a seperate project, that can initially >>> be used by QEMU as a submodule, keeping Makefile.objs until a proper >>> shared library with stability guarantees etc is ready.. >>> >>> The subproject could created by preserving git tags, and cleaning up th= e code style, this way: >>> >>> git filter-branch --tree-filter "if ls * 1> /dev/null 2>&1; then clang-= format -i * /dev/null; fi " -f --subdirectory-filter "slirp" --prune-empty = --tag-name-filter cat -- --all >>> (my clang-format https://gist.github.com/elmarco/cb20c8d92007df0e2fb8a2= 404678ac73) >>> >>> What do you think? >>=20 >> Has the slirp code been improved to be generally useful? I still got it >> filed under "friends don't let friends use that, except for testing"... > > The slirp code is already used in a lot of other projects: The issue I have with SLIRP isn't that it solves a useless problem (au contraire!), it's that it's a useless solution. Okay, that's an unfair exaggeration, it's not useless, I just wouldn't trust it in production, unless it has improved significantly since I last looked at it. > - WinUAE > (https://github.com/tonioni/WinUAE/tree/master/slirp) > > - Previous > (https://sourceforge.net/p/previous/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/src/slirp/) > > - BasiliskII > (https://github.com/cebix/macemu/tree/master/BasiliskII/src/slirp) > > - Bochs > > (https://sourceforge.net/p/bochs/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/bochs/iodev/network= /slirp/) > > ... and likely many more. AFAIK they all (or at least most) have been > forked from the QEMU code at one point in time and diverged, i.e. they > likely missed the bug fixes and new features that have been added in > QEMU (like IPv6). So yes, IMHO it makes a lot of sense to try to make a > separate library out of the slirp code again, especially if we could > convince the other projects to use it, too, and to collaborate on that > version. No objections to spinning it out, as long as it comes with a fair assessment of its limitations. Turning it into a proper project might even improve its chances to get improved towards production quality, compared to its current existence as a corner of QEMU next to nobody wants to touch.