Re: [Qemu-devel] Unmaintained QEMU builds

[Alexander Graf]

On 07.09.2010, at 09:38, Tristan Gingold wrote:

> 
> On Sep 7, 2010, at 12:44 AM, Andreas Färber wrote:
> 
>> Am 05.09.2010 um 17:57 schrieb Anthony Liguori:
>> 
>>> On 09/05/2010 10:10 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
>>>>> As a baby step, is there any chance of publishing an automatic nightly 
>>>>> Windows (cross-)build as a .zip file on qemu.org? That might give more 
>>>>> users a chance of detecting runtime faults during the development cycle.
>>>> 
>>>> That's doable and useful, yes.
>>> 
>>> I doubt it's useful.
>>> 
>>> [...] We don't have myriads of users demanding better Windows support.  
>>> Search the list, there's almost no one asking questions about Windows [...]
>> 
>> Right. There's some more recent posts on that QEMU forum, although buried 
>> beneath a pile of spam.
>> 
>> Anyway, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. There's not much Win32 (nor Win64) 
>> contributions, there's a guesstimated minor number of users. Many of us 
>> including myself don't really care about the platform. When some Windows 
>> user does show up and reports an error against QEMU Manager v7.0, we have no 
>> clue what QEMU exactly that is based on, how it was compiled and whether 
>> there may be downstream patches involved, so we're not of much help. Nobody 
>> that I remember ever came up with git-bisect results to pinpoint where/how 
>> their regression was introduced.
> 
> We use qemu on windows.  But in fact all our work is currently based on qemu 
> 0.11.
> 
> But we don't use qemu like most of you: we mostly care about ppc, we don't 
> care about the bios (we directly run our executables) and
> we run without vga card (serial line is fine for us).  This configuration 
> works (or maybe worked) pretty well.

Mind if I ask what exactly you're trying to emulate there?

Alex

> When qemu 0.13 will be available, we will try to port our patchset on both 
> 0.13 and head.  We also plan to submit some of our patches.
> Then we will try to more closely follow the development.

That sounds great.

Overall, I think all we lack is someone who feels responsible for Windows. And 
that person should be the maintainer and whenever something needs to be done 
wrt Windows, it's his field. We do the same for BSD (blue swirl) and pretty 
much OSX (Andreas and me). The real missing point here is someone who feels 
responsible.


Alex