Re: [RFC] Unify KVM kernel-space and user-space code into a single project

Alexander Graf
2010-03-22T19:58:26Z

On 22.03.2010, at 20:54, Ingo Molnar wrote:

>
> * Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de> wrote:
>
>> Yes. I think the point was that every layer in between brings potential
>> slowdown and loss of features.
>
> Exactly. The more 'fragmented' a project is into sub-projects, without a
> single, unified, functional reference implementation in the center of it, the
> longer it takes to fix 'unsexy' problems like trivial usability bugs.

I agree to that part. As previously stated there are few people working on qemu that would go and implement higher level things though. So some solution is needed there.

> Furthermore, another negative effect is that many times features are
> implemented not in their technically best way, but in a way to keep them local
> to the project that originates them. This is done to keep deployment latencies
> and general contribution overhead down to a minimum. The moment you have to
> work with yet another project, the overhead adds up.

I disagree there. Keeping things local and self-contained has been the UNIX secret. It works really well as long as the boundaries are well defined.

The problem we're facing is that we're simply lacking an active GUI / desktop user development community. We have desktop users, but nobody feels like tackling the issue of doing a great GUI project while talking to qemu-devel about his needs.

> So developers rather go for the quicker (yet inferior) hack within the
> sub-project they have best access to.

Well - not necessarily hacks. It's more about project boundaries. Nothing is bad about that. You wouldn't want "ls" implemented in the Linux kernel either, right? :-)

Alex