KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management [LWN.net]

KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

Posted Mar 24, 2010 3:56 UTC (Wed) by amit (subscriber, #1274)
Parent article: KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

This article to me (as someone who's followed the whole thread and the discussions leading to that thread) looks biased. Or maybe it's because the otherwise thorough editor hasn't followed the entire discussion.

It started when Jes Sorensen sent out a mail about how best to expose performance counters to guests:

http://www.mail-archive.com/kvm@vger.kernel.org/msg29514....

This lead to the following discussions about supporting perf across the host-guest boundary as well as having proprietary guests do their own profiling.

As a result of some discussions there, Yanmin Zhang posted a patch that used perf to profile a guest and host from the host when using the same kernel on both the systems (in the same thread, and continued in the two threads linked below).

http://www.mail-archive.com/kvm@vger.kernel.org/msg29529....

http://www.spinics.net/lists/kvm/msg31008.html

As these threads go, the discussion moved to KVM usability, about the QEMU command line, about the usability of libvirt/virt-manager, etc.

http://www.mail-archive.com/kvm@vger.kernel.org/msg29669....

And then to Ingo's suggestion about merging QEMU into tools/kvm, and how that would help development. And the KVM/QEMU folks on how that would fracture the QEMU community, with some input from folks from other projects as well.

http://www.mail-archive.com/kvm@vger.kernel.org/msg30782....

to post comments

Biased?

Posted Mar 24, 2010 13:39 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (6 responses)

So I see a discussion on how you could have written a better article than I did, which is fine. But I don't see a justification for the use of the term "biased." Could you please explain where that comes from?

This was a hard article to write; I spent a lot of time reading and rereading the discussion and trying to present both sides as fairly as I could. By the end, if I had a bias at all, it was certainly of the "a pox on both your houses" variety. Is that the bias you see?

Biased?

Posted Mar 24, 2010 14:40 UTC (Wed) by aliguori (guest, #30636) [Link]

I think it was a fair article.

I think there's some perspective on certain issues that is missing (QEMU certainly wasn't dying before KVM) but it's not possible to understand from just reading that thread.

Biased?

Posted Mar 24, 2010 15:42 UTC (Wed) by avik (guest, #704) [Link]

I spent a lot of time reading and rereading the discussion

I feel sorry for you. Reading and writing this thread just once left a foul taste in my mouth. I hope it won't reduce my enjoyment of working on the kernel permanently.

Biased?

Posted Mar 24, 2010 17:31 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

If both sides think the article was biased then you know you nailed it.

Biased?

Posted Mar 24, 2010 17:52 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Neither Ingo nor Avi nor Anthony has complained about bias, so I'd say it's even more unbiased. (It's sort of like XOR.)

Biased?

Posted Mar 25, 2010 12:06 UTC (Thu) by amit (subscriber, #1274) [Link] (1 responses)

There are a few things that I felt were one-sided in the article. Most prominently, in the closing note, you hint that the KVM maintainers could be replaced if they're being unreasonable is something that could happen to get the feature in. I feel this was uncalled for, it does serve as a good data point to note, but it might just widen the differences between the various developers and maintainers here. The KVM developers' stand is that nothing's wrong with the repository split and there are security concerns with exposing guest information to the host. One would expect virt developers to know more about virt deployments and security than non-virt developers, at least.

However, I might myself sound too acrimonious and judgemental, I do not wish to convey badness. We've had enough foul messages going back and forth already.

Biased?

Posted Mar 25, 2010 18:31 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

> Most prominently, in the closing note, you hint that the KVM maintainers
> could be replaced if they're being unreasonable

I reread the end of the article and could not detect any such hint. Quite to the contrary, Jon wrote that KVM maintainers will not be overriden.

You might want to take the possibility into account that you are overly sensitive concerning this topic. (I don't know who you are or how you are involved. I use neither KVM nor Qemu, so I'm not involved.)