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

Ingo Molnar
2010-03-18T13:59:44Z

* Daniel P. Berrange <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 02:31:24PM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> >
> > * Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On 03/18/2010 03:02 PM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> [...] What users eagerly replace their kernels?
> > > >
> > > > Those 99% who click on the 'install 193 updates' popup.
> > > >
> > >
> > > Of which 1 is the kernel, and 192 are userspace updates (of which one may be
> > > qemu).
> >
> > I think you didnt understand my (tersely explained) point - which is probably
> > my fault. What i said is:
> >
> > - distros update the kernel first. Often in stable releases as well if
> > there's a new kernel released. (They must because it provides new hardware
> > enablement and other critical changes they generally cannot skip.)
> >
> > - Qemu on the other hand is not upgraded with (nearly) that level of urgency.
> > Completely new versions will generally have to wait for the next distro
> > release.
>
> This has nothing todo with them being in separate source repos. We could
> update QEMU to new major feature releaes with the same frequency in a Fedora
> release, but we delibrately choose not to rebase the QEMU userspace because
> experiance has shown the downside from new bugs / regressions outweighs the
> benefit of any new features.
>
> The QEMU updates in stable Fedora trees, now just follow the minor bugfix
> release stream provided by QEMU & those arrive in Fedora with little
> noticable delay.

That is exactly what i said: Qemu and most user-space packages are on a
'slower' update track than the kernel: generally updated for minor releases.

My further point was that the kernel on the other hand gets updated more
frequently and as such, any user-space tool bits hosted in the kernel repo get
updated more frequently as well.

Thanks,

Ingo