QEMU Summit Minutes 2024

QEMU Summit Minutes 2024

[Peter Maydell]

QEMU Summit Minutes 2024
========================

As usual, we held a QEMU Summit meeting at KVM Forum.  This is an
invite-only meeting for the most active maintainers and submaintainers
in the project, and we discuss various project-wide issues, usually
process stuff. We then post the minutes of the meeting to the list as
a jumping off point for wider discussion and for those who weren't
able to attend.

Attendees
=========

Dan Berrangé
Cédric Le Goater
Kevin Wolf
Michael S. Tsirkin
Stefan Hajnoczi
Philippe Mathieu-Daudé
Markus Armbruster
Thomas Huth
Peter Maydell
Paolo Bonzini
Alex Graf
Alex Bennée
Richard Henderson

Infrastructure and Funding
--------------------------

Up until now we have been running our CI and infrastructure based on
donations of services/credits from various hosting providers (first
Rackspace, then Azure, and now DigitalOcean).  But because each of
these infrastructure sponsors has their own differing idea of what
infra to offer OSS projects for free, we end up with awkward
migrations of our systems each time we switch to a different infra
sponsor.

Paolo proposed, going forward, to instead seek monetary sponsorships,
potentially multi-year, that give us a recurring funding stream long
term.  We can then use this to fund CI and similar requirements.

The KVM Forum conference itself made a small profit; we plan to keep
this separate to help with the financing of the conference in future
years.

Link GitLab handles in MAINTAINERS or have a .handlemap a la .mailmap
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Philippe Mathieu-Daudé pointed out that it's awkward to find a
maintainer's gitlab handle if you want to cc them on a bug report in
GitLab.  We agreed that it would be good to record this in
MAINTAINERS or something similar.  Philippe will post a proposal to
the list at some point.

Enforce SPDX license tag in new contributions
---------------------------------------------

We currently have SPDX tags in some files, but don't mandate them.
The suggestion here was to make them mandatory in new files, so we
can automatically catch accidental license problems like "user refers
to a non-existent license or a license that's probably not what they
meant like LGPLv2" or "user forgets to say 'or later' for GPL code"
or "user forgets to put in license comment at all" or "user uses a
license that is GPL-compatible but which we don't use at all at the
moment, with no strong reason why they couldn't use some license we
do already use".  These are all very easy to clear up if we catch
them before the code gets upstream and potentially painful to deal
with after the fact.

There were no objections, so Dan Berrangé has posted a checkpatch
update that enforces the SPDX rule.

Code-of-Conduct Committee
-------------------------

Though we decided last year that there should be a separate set of
persons taking care of Code-of-Conduct violation reports, there
hasn't been much progress on this topic during the past year.  Thomas
Huth has now volunteered to have a try to assemble such a team by
doing a request on the qemu-devel mailing list.

Rust
----

We had some discussion about the project maintenance aspects of
adding Rust to QEMU.  Alex has already sent out a "Rust BoF and
maintainer minutes and planning the roadmap to Rust" thread last
month which covers this discussion and the BoF; I won't summarise
here so as to not bifurcate the discussion.


thanks
-- PMM

Re: QEMU Summit Minutes 2024

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 01:32:09PM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
> Infrastructure and Funding
> --------------------------
> 
> Up until now we have been running our CI and infrastructure based on
> donations of services/credits from various hosting providers (first
> Rackspace, then Azure, and now DigitalOcean).  But because each of
> these infrastructure sponsors has their own differing idea of what
> infra to offer OSS projects for free, we end up with awkward
> migrations of our systems each time we switch to a different infra
> sponsor.
> 
> Paolo proposed, going forward, to instead seek monetary sponsorships,
> potentially multi-year, that give us a recurring funding stream long
> term.  We can then use this to fund CI and similar requirements.

On that theme, we also already accept adhoc donations from individuals
but have never made this very obvious, instead hiding the paypal link.

Now that we have a clear desire to try to fund our own project services
more directly, we should be more open to receiving adhoc donations from
individuals too.

We don't need to aggressively nag people, but there's little harm in
having a link to donations more prominently featured IMHO. Thus I
created a qemu-web proposal to put a donations link in the nav bar of
the front page:

   https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu-web/-/merge_requests/7

With regards,
Daniel
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