Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] remove pieces of source code

[Glauber Costa <glommer@redhat.com>]

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 12:50:56AM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Glauber Costa wrote:
> > Have you ever seen a girl so beautiful that you, geeky,
> > think: "I'll never stand a chance"?
> >
> > But sometimes, you decide to make your move anyway. There's
> > always the chance that in that very day she'll be specially
> > in good mood, and you'll get what you want.
> >
> > With the exception of the fact that qemu is not a girl,
> > that's more or less what I'm trying to do here: Hopefully,
> > nobody will notice what I'm trying to do, and will commmit it.
> > Later, when realizing, it will be too late. Victory will be mine.
> >
> > Or maybe people will even agree. For that, I'll try briefly
> > to arguee my point, without disclosing to much, avoiding
> > jeopardizing the strategy I explained above:
> >
> >   This patch removes a piece of code that is unmaintaned,
> >   that does not receive an update for years,
> >   that get bug reports on the list that nobody fixes, because
> >   nobody really understands,
> >   that places some artificial constraints on other subsystems
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Glauber Costa <glommer@redhat.com
> 
> Let's actually build a proper case instead of closing our eyes and
> hitting enter.  Here are the downsides of kqemu I know of:
Okay... you do realize I was kidding, and I never really expected this to
happen at first, right? ;-)

> 
>  o Since it's enabled by default, it forces the default build to support
> < 4GB of guest memory
>  o It attempts to use /dev/shm for guest memory which means a special
> option is needed in the default build to use more than 1/2 of host ram size
>  o It touches an awful lot of places in QEMU
>  o Some of the BIOS changes are particularly nasty and will prevent
> having a unified BIOS between QEMU and Bochs
>  o The kernel bits will never go upstream for Linux
>  o No one actively supports kqemu in upstream QEMU
> 
> That said, here are the arguments for keeping kqemu
> 
>  o Even though it's unmaintained, it seems to work for people
But traffic in the mailing list indicates that it is less and less the case.
And more importantly: As it bitrots, nobody fixes it. so...

>  o There is no alternative for non-Linux users and folks with non-VT/SVM
> hardware

Sure, but I don't think kqemu is such an alternative. ;-)