Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] ARM: three easy patches for coverity-reported issues

[Peter Maydell]

On 18 February 2014 12:17, Alexander Graf <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 02/18/2014 12:22 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> My criteria for ARM in the past has typically been "there's
>> a new release every three months, anything that got past
>> the release testing process for release N is sufficiently
>> non-critical it can just go into release N+1".
>
> Unfortunately this doesn't work for distributions. Distros
> need to maintain a stable branch for the lifetime of a release
> to ensure that we're reasonably regression free.
>
> If you indicate that this doesn't apply to ARM it basically means you admit
> that ARM systems are not yet ready for "stable" use by customers when they
> want to use KVM. At least at the point when we agree that customers do want
> to run on a stable base for virtualization on ARM we need a working -stable
> system for critical fixes.

I agree in general that ARM support needs to move from
its traditional "this is just a dev tool" situation to
a broader level of support/stability guarantees for KVM.
(We're not yet guaranteeing cross-version migration,
for another example there.)

However again we run into the definition of "what's a
critical fix?". I think if distros need a stable branch
then they need to be prepared to do the work of sorting
through what counts as a critical fix that needs to be
ported to that branch. (For instance, which boards and
targets do they care about?)

For instance patch 3 only applies to the integrator
board, and I don't consider the guest-to-host border
to be a security boundary for most of our legacy board
models: there's just too much unaudited device code for
that to be trustable.

thanks
-- PMM