Re: Cleaning up contrib/ and tools/

[Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>]

On Wed, 25 Mar 2026 at 11:44, Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> writes:
>
> > We have a couple of directories in our source tree which have
> > accumulated things in them that don't really belong there; this is a
> > proposal to clean up by moving things to more appropriate locations
> > (as 11.1 work, obviously).
> >
> > Firstly, contrib/ has a tendency to be a dumping ground for stuff that
> > we didn't think hard enough about finding a good home for, and for
> > things in a weird "not really maintained" state. We should either
> > (a) care enough about something to give it a correct home and to
> > maintain it, or (b) not care about it, and kick it out of our tree.
> >
> > Secondly, tools/ exists but is very under-used. I think it should be
> > for the set of standalone tools that we build if you configure
> > --enable-tools and which we document in docs/tools.  Currently it
> > contains two things, one of which doesn't match that idea...
> >
> > So, starting with tools/:
>
> [...]
>
> > And for contrib/, easy ones first:
> >  * contrib/vhost-user-{blk,bridge,gpu,input,scsi} move to tools/
> >  * contrib/elf2dmp moves to tools/
> >  * contrib/ivshmem-client and contrib/ivshmem-server move to tools/
>
> Absolutely not.  This is example code, provided in the hope of helping
> people understand the protocol, and experiment with it.  It is entirely
> unfit for more serious use, and that's intentional.

So, example code but we don't think it's a good example ? :-)

Our system documentation seems to assume you're going to run
ivshmem-server:

https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/devices/ivshmem.html

> Perhaps contrib/ is not a good home for example code.  It seems to
> bother people whose judgement I respect.  Can we find a better home?

I'm not sure to what extent we should be in the business of
providing example code. If we are doing that we should label
it all a bit better...

-- PMM