Re: Cleaning up contrib/ and tools/

[Kostiantyn Kostiuk <kkostiuk@redhat.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3036 bytes --]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 7:09 PM Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
wrote:

> 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/:
>
>  * tools/ebpf/ is the source for the pre-generated
>    ebpf/rss.bpf.skeleton.h ; it should move to ebpf/
>  * tools/i386/qemu-vmsr-helper.c is the source for the
>    qemu-vmsr-helper tool; it can stay (should it lose its
>    i386/ subdir ?)
>  * the tools which currently are in the top level directory
>    should move into tools/:
>     - qemu-bridge-helper.c
>     - qemu-edid.c
>     - qemu-img.c
>     - qemu-io.c
>     - qemu-keymap.c
>     - qemu-nbd.c
>
> 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/
>  * contrib/plugins moves to plugins/plugins (or a different subdir
>    name of your choice)
>
> For contrib/, ones I'm less sure about:
>
>  * contrib/vmapple/uuid.sh is a one-liner; we should either commit to
>    having this, by giving it a better name and documentation and
>    installing it in 'make install', or else junk it and have
>    docs/system/arm/vmapple.rst give you the plutil command and tell
>    you to run it directly.
>  * contrib/gitdm moves to scripts/ ? It's just config data for
>    generating statistics about patches, so with other
>    developer-related stuff makes sense.
>  * contrib/systemd -- we don't do anything with these (e.g.
>    'make install' ignores them), so I am sceptical about their
>    usefulness. We could drop them, or move them to scripts/, or put
>    them in tools/ and qga/ with the tools that they are systemd
>    scripts for.
>

Not sure that we need qemu-guest-agent.service at all. Fedora/CentOS don't
use it and create a different service file.
I think this one can be dropped.

Best Regards,
Kostiantyn Kostiuk.



>
> Then we can delete contrib/ entirely.
>
> (scripts/ is also in danger of being "miscellaneous dumping
> ground", of course. I have tried not to suggest it as the
> destination when I could think of an alternative.)
>
> -- PMM
>
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3914 bytes --]