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Date: Fri, 29 May 2009 00:50:56 -0500
From: Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>
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Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] remove pieces of source code
References: <1243551838-1980-1-git-send-email-glommer@redhat.com>
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To: Glauber Costa <glommer@redhat.com>
Cc: aliguori@us.ibm.com, qemu-devel@nongnu.org

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:

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

Regards,

Anthony Liguori