From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:60344) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1V6LRp-0007jg-59 for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 05 Aug 2013 10:07:50 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1V6LRh-0008I6-Rn for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 05 Aug 2013 10:07:45 -0400 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:41170) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1V6LRh-0008I1-IN for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 05 Aug 2013 10:07:37 -0400 Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2013 14:50:27 +0100 From: "Daniel P. Berrange" Message-ID: <20130805135027.GF5108@redhat.com> References: <1375701492-21759-1-git-send-email-peter.maydell@linaro.org> <20130805124922.GA5108@redhat.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] Versioned machine types for ARM/non-x86 ? (Was Re: [PATCH v4 0/2] ARM: add 'virt' platform) Reply-To: "Daniel P. Berrange" List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Peter Maydell Cc: aliguori@us.ibm.com, "Mian M. Hamayun" , patches@linaro.org, Markus Armbruster , qemu-devel@nongnu.org, kvmarm@lists.cs.columbia.edu On Mon, Aug 05, 2013 at 02:02:54PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote: > On 5 August 2013 13:49, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > > On x86, we've long had versioned machine names, so that we can > > make changes in future QEMU releases without breaking guest ABI > > compatibility. AFAICT, the problem has basically been ignored > > on non-x86 platforms in QEMU. > > Yes; this is deliberate on the basis that starting to do this > is accepting a huge pile of maintenance workload (ie checking > for things which change, keeping around a pile of old version > machine models, retaining migration compatibility between > old and new versions). Which isn't to say I'm against it > but it means I'm not doing it until the pushback from users > that it's necessary is pretty strong. > > > Given the increased interest in > > ARM in particular, should we use the addition of this new 'virt' > > machine type, as an opportunity to introduce versioning for > > ARM too. eg make this machine be called 'virt-1.0.6' and then > > have 'virt' simply be an alias that points to the most recent > > version. > > I'm not convinced we're at the point where we need to do this > yet. Ok, fair enough. Something to consider in the future then. Daniel -- |: http://berrange.com -o- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: http://entangle-photo.org -o- http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|