Where should the vhost-user specification live?

["Alex Bennée" <alex.bennee@linaro.org>]

Hi,

Apologies for the wide cross-posting but I wanted to find as many
interested parties as possible.

The vhost-user specification currently lives in the main qemu
repository (docs/interop/vhost-user.rst) mainly due to historical
reasons. QEMU was one of the first VMMs to implement vhost-user and the
spec needed to live somewhere.

However there are now vhost-user implementations for QEMU, rust-vmm,
cloud hypervisor and I think CrosVM. We get queries about changing or
updating the spec on qemu-devel from time to time and I feel that given
it is an interoperability specification we should think about hosting
it and its discussions elsewhere.

I think broadly there are 4 options:

  *  Move into the OASIS VirtIO group as an appendix/addendum to the main
     VirtIO spec.

     This probably brings the widest visibility to changes to those that
     might be affected. However it does come with a certain amount of
     bureaucracy with the OASIS process where only members can vote on
     changes. While intimately tied to VirtIO it's concerns are more
     focused on practical implementation details of the IPC between VMMs
     and device backends.

  * Move to a separate project under the qemu-project space.

    QEMU hosts a number of sub-projects and mirrors so it would be easy
    enough to split the spec into its own repo. Changes to the
    specification could then be divorced from QEMU's release cycle and
    at the maintainers option issues and merging strategies could be
    configured for just the specification.

  * Create a new project just for vhost-user

    The interested parties could decide where to host (github, gitlab,
    forgejo, whatever..) and decide to move away from mailing lists
    altogether or create a mailing list but manage changes via the forge
    interface.

  * Status quo

    Just keep the spec where it is and muddle through as before. Maybe
    we could improve the contribution documentation for how and when
    changes are discussed.

Any thoughts?

-- 
Alex Bennée
Virtualisation Tech Lead @ Linaro