Re: [libvirt] [PATCH 00/44] Require QEMU 1.3.0 or newer

On Tue, Apr 03, 2018 at 01:23:15PM +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote: > Bumping our minimum QEMU version wouldn't affect that kind of > scenario, as long as we keep making sure libvirt itself builds on > RHEL 6 - which we already do as part of the CI effort. Building on RHEL-6 without supporting QEMU/KVM from RHEL-6 is pointless, you might as well just drop the whole platform. It is not a compelling story to tell users you can build on RHEL-6 but you won't be able to use the hypervisor from RHEL-6, as the kernel+KVM+QEMU triple is the compelling part from guest OS pov.

> Honestly, who in the world absolutely needs the very last libvirt > while at the same time being stuck with QEMU < 1.3.0? However you > slice it, that doesn't sound like a remotely sane scenario. The version of libvirt that ships with RHEL-6 is very old, lacking many features and certainly hasn't had all relevant bug fixes backported. It is certaily relevant to wish to use new libvirt with old QEMU for "some" period of time. The question is how far back to go. Previously we've said 2 major RHEL releases was the target The tension is that the gap between RHEL-5 and RHEL-6 and RHEL-7 was approx 3 years. If that pattern had carried on RHEL-8 would have arrived in 2017, and we would have thus culled RHEL-6 support some time last year. This is a sign that instead of saying 2 major releases, we should instead define "NN" years of overlapping support for a value of NN that is 2 or 3. ie drop RHEL-6 as a target after RHEL-7 has been released for NN years.