Re: [libvirt] RFC: Drop unmaintained hv drivers? (phyp, xenapi, hyperv)
On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 03:54:00PM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:
Hi all,
There's a few old hypervisor drivers in the tree that haven't been actively
maintained for a long time. I'm curious if anyone knows of these drivers being
actively used. If not I think we should consider dropping them
src/phyp/ : for power VM hypervisor. Added in July 2009. The last commit that
looks like it wasn't either internal API conversion, or caught by code
analysis, is:
commit 41461ff7f7d6ee6679aae2a8004e305c5830c9e8
Author: Eduardo Otubo <otubo(a)linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Date: Tue Apr 19 12:34:08 2011 -0300
PHYP: Adding reboot domain function
Adding reboot <domain> function for pHyp driver.
Nearly 5 years ago. Eduardo is the primary driver author too (CCd at his email
from github).
Searching the upstream bug tracker for all bugs with 'phyp', the only one
that's actually about the phyp driver is a report from 2 years ago that it
crashes trying to open a connection:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1093094
The phyp driver would have a fairly niche end user audience, so it would
not be entirely surprising to not hear much about it.
src/xenapi/: Connecting to a xen api server. Added in March 2010.
Largely
appears to be a code drop, the original author/committer has never had another
commit. The last xenapi specific commit seems to be:
commit 484460ec4678a264c5e7355495c2f0da72cb42bd
Author: Matthias Bolte <matthias.bolte(a)googlemail.com>
Date: Thu Jul 21 15:16:11 2011 +0200
xenapi: Improve error reporting in xenapiOpen once again
Nearly 5 years ago. The only upstream bug that was filed about xenapi is:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=711372
Which was about a connection failure that was eventually fixed upstream, and
dovetailed into the above referenced commit. Current xen guys, you know of
anyone using this?
The XenAPI driver was never "finished" as IIRC the person who started work
on it, left XenSource before he was able to make it functional enough to
be useful. The XenAPI was targetting the closed source Xen products, as
opposed to the open source platform, which is now libxl based. I did vaguely
remember talk of the Xen products eventualy moving over to be libxl based
instead of XenAPi, but I don't know if that's actually accurate or not.
src/hyperv/: Added in July 2011. This was largely a code drop as
well;
committed and patched a few times by Matthias but it was a university project
by someone else. Last hyperv targeted patch was:
commit 9e9ea3ead9825bd1dc2c17cea4abc8c4165591d0
Author: Matthias Bolte <matthias.bolte(a)googlemail.com>
Date: Sun Sep 9 17:39:40 2012 +0200
hyperv: Fix and improve hypervListAllDomains
The driver is fairly minimal as well: it can only list existing VMs and
perform lifecycle operations. It can't create new VMs, and doesn't list VM
device config AFAICT.
This is a fairly similar level of functionality to the XenAPI driver, but
I'm pretty loathe for us to loose even the limited hyperv support, as it
is very much an active product that's not going away.
In general I'm not really in favour of dropping virt drivers for hypervisor
platforms that still exist and have potential users, even if we don't hear
much about them. I don't think any of these drivers is really giving us a
significant maintenance headache to justify deletion.
Regards,
Daniel
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