Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH RFC] hw/pc: set q35 as the default x86 machine

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Sun, Jun 03, 2018 at 12:27:49PM +0300, Marcel Apfelbaum wrote:
> Moving to QEMU 3.0 seems like a good opportunity for such a change.
> 
> I440FX is really old and does not support modern features like IOMMU.
> Q35's SATA emulation is faster than pc's IDE, native PCI express hotplug
> is cleaner than ACPI based one and so on...
> 
> Also the libvirt guys added very good support for the Q35 machine (thanks!).
> 
> Management software should always specify the machine type and for the
> current setups, adding '-machine pc' to the command line is not such a
> big deal.
> 
> In time the pc machine will fade out and we will probably stop adding
> new versions at some point.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Marcel Apfelbaum <address@hidden>

For command line users, I think changing the default isn't nice.

Yes it's easy to add -machine pc but there's no documentation
that tells you to do so. Add to that shortcuts like -cdrom
stop working, hotplug needs extra bridges to work, and one
can see that while management tool users benefit from q35,
command line users will suffer.

Can't we add a tag for management without changing the command line
default? How about "management-default"? "recommended"? "latest"?

-- 
MST