On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 6:27 AM Daniel P. Berrangé <berra...@redhat.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 08, 2021 at 12:41:30PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote: > > The FreeBSD project has rewritten bsd-user. We've been working on this > for > > quite some time (the earliest commits date from 2013). Maybe a dozen > people > > have worked on this over time, and there's 3 or 4 active developers > focused > > on FreeBSD changes at the moment. > > The fact that you have 3-4 people involved in this work is will be very > helpful to you going forward with a QEMU maintenance. > > The biggest problem with getting code merged into QEMU is an insufficient > number of reviewers for the amount of patches sent. Since we have a rule > that patches need a review from someone else who isn't the author, if there > are two people with expertize to review patches in a given QEMU subsystem, > then they can become self-sufficient and review each others patches on > qemu-devel, which then makes merging much more productive. > Yes. That's my hope too. We've been doing this internally for changes we've been landing lately, so I think expanding our process to also do this with qemu upstream will be a natural progression... > If anyone wants to be automatically CC'd on patches for bsd-user for the > purposes of acting as a designated reviewer, they can added to MAINTAINERS > file to, alongside the primary maintainer(s). > I'll be adding myself, at least, to MAINTAINERS and encouraging the others that have been working on this to take the time to review when I post. They are quite willing, but may lack the time, alas, so I'll do what I can to time the patches such that at least one of them has the time in a reasonable time frame... > > So, my new plan is to rebase what changes I can to the tip of master and > > submit those for review. I'll work with the developers on the FreeBSD > side > > to ensure they are included in reviews in addition to the normal > qemu-devel > > list. This will allow us to pare down the deltas between our code and > > upstream to allow us to make progress. The changes will be held to the > > standard 'makes things better'. Given how broken bsd-user is today in > qemu > > upstream, at first that will a very easy standard to make. > > > > The first patch I'll submit will be changing MAINTAINERS to point to me, > > since I'm acting as the point person in this effort. I'll then re-submit > > some other changes that I've submitted in the past, but CC the FreeBSD > > folks that are currently active (they were only CC'd to former developers > > who lack the time to review). > > > But before I get too far down this path, I thought I'd send out what's > > going on to qemu-devel so I can get feedback and adjust the plan into > > something that's mutually agreeable so time I put towards this is not > > wasted. > > No objections from me. Since current bsd-user is orphaned, largely > unusable, and you're volunteering your time to make it better, I'm > supportive of whatever you believe is the most time efficient way > to improve bsd-user. > > I presume some of the current QEMU maintainers knowledgable about > linux-user will be able to review the patches, and as mentioned > above, if other BSD devs currently active in bsd-user work can > also provide reviews on qemu-devel that'll be useful long term. > Yes. Many of the patches are copied from there, as well as the initial version coming largely from there as well (it seems, I wasn't around at the time and base this entirely on code similarities). The FreeBSD project makes such heavy use of this, that I really want to find some way we can stay current and maybe even have better abstractions that make all user-mode emulation easier... Warner
