Re: [PATCH] Mark Multi-Process QEMU as Orphaned

[John Levon <john.levon@nutanix.com>]

On Fri, May 08, 2026 at 11:07:28AM -0400, Jagannathan Raman wrote:

> On 5/8/26 10:37 AM, John Levon wrote:
> > On Fri, May 08, 2026 at 02:33:59PM +0000, Jag Raman wrote:
> > 
> > > > QEMU maintainers can correct me, but I'd think it has to go through a
> > > > deprecation cycle first?
> > > If the code has to soak in a deprecated state, I think an “Obsolete” status
> > > better fits it as it’s replaced by vfio-user.
> > Are you saying you and/or Elena are still maintaining the vfio-user
> > implementation in hw/remote ? As I don't think there's anything happening there
> > either.
> 
> The vfio-user implementation is the server part of the vfio-user client and it
> utilizes the x-remote machine object. I do maintain it - I proposed a fix to
> bug last week and reviewed an alternative proposal from Marc-Andre.

When I was asking you about mpqemu, I was talking about all of hw/remote, not
just the legacy backend. Apologies if I misunderstood you.

I think "S: Odd Fixes" is more appropriate (see below).

> There's no active development on it due to a lack of inbound feature requests.
> Are you looking for any specific features?

Confused by this comment, as we've discussed before several times that you were
going to migrate the testing across to vfio-user instead of the legacy protocol,
then remove the legacy protocol altogether.

Then no patches arrived, so I presume that's not going to happen.

> If you want to bring the maintenance of this under your purview, I'm OK with

I don't have cycles/interest for this unfortunately.


How about the following:

1) mark the whole subsystem as Odd Fixes

2) mark the legacy backend as Obsolete

3) if we don't see any further work on converting mpqemu over to vfio-user
properly over, say, the next calendar year, then remove the whole feature.

regards
john