Re: [Qemu-devel] Proposal for deprecating unsupported host OSes & architecutures

[Knut Omang <knut.omang@oracle.com>]

On Thu, 2017-03-16 at 15:23 +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
> OK, here's a concrete proposal for deprecating/dropping out of
> date host OS and architecture support.
> 
> We'll put this in the ChangeLog 'Future incompatible changes'
> section:
> -----
> * Removal of support for untested host OS and architectures:
> 
> The QEMU Project intends to drop support in a future release for any
> host OS or architecture which we do not have access to a build and test
> machine for. This affects the following host OSes:
>  * Native CYGWIN building
>  * GNU/kFreeBSD
>  * FreeBSD
>  * DragonFly BSD
>  * NetBSD
>  * OpenBSD
>  * Solaris
>  * AIX
>  * Haiku
> and the following host CPU architectures:
>  * ia64
>  * sparc

Can we please keep the Sparc support in for a while still?

There is an increasing recognition of the value of better support for 
QEMU within Oracle and hopefully we can get some traction on this in not too
long.

I have colleagues currently looking at various ways forward
both in the direction of implementing support for newer Sparc architectures in
QEMU and also investigating support for native KVM support for Linux on Sparc.

When it comes to build platforms, a legitimate need to be able to keep anything
running, I don't have any authority to promise away hardware or other forms of
Sparc access, but I have been told that that part can be worked out in some way
if we get enough support for this internally. 

Thanks,
Knut

> Specifically, if we do not have a build and test system available
> to us by the time we release QEMU 2.10, we will remove support in the
> release that follows 2.10.
> -----
> 
> I'm not sure here if we want to just have this as a bald list,
> or to have some kind of two tier setup with OSes we expect to
> dump in one tier and OSes where we're really trolling for a build
> machine in the other tier (the "unlikely to dump" category would
> get most of the BSD variants in it). Putting out a changelog
> that says "we're gonna drop all the BSDs" seems like it might
> produce a lot of yelling?
> 
> Should "native CYGWIN" be in the drop list? I only test
> mingw cross compile, but configure has a separate section for
> CYGWIN in its $targetos case statement.
> 
> It would also not be too difficult to make configure warn when it
> is run on the deprecated OS or architecture, so we should probably
> sneak that into 2.9.
> 
> (Technically right this instant 'mips' and 's390' would be in the
> 'dump' list, since I don't personally have access yet. But we have
> a plan for s390, and it turns out there is a mips machine in the
> gcc compile farm which I'm just checking out.)
> 
> thanks
> -- PMM
>