On Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 00:10:02 -0500, Eric Blake wrote:
The following is the latest version of my API proposal for
incremental backups.
I have even more work-in-progress patches on top of these:
https://repo.or.cz/libvirt/ericb.git
which I am slowly improving to be more in line with my thread
on the overview of the API usage:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2018-October/msg00217.html
But I am fairly satisfied that the API as presented is sufficient for
everything I have still been implementing in the qemu driver, and
that even when qemu is slightly tweaked (such as dropping the x-
prefix on various commands, or maybe adding a new command to make
it easier to compute the estimated size of the union of several
bitmaps), those changes will be limited to the src/qemu directory
rather than affecting the API.
Since I will be demonstrating the use of this API at the KVM Forum,
I would really like a decision on whether we can commit the API
into libvirt now, even if we have to wait for the qemu implementation
No we can't. We did it once in the past and although I don't remember
the exact details I remember it turned out to be a bad idea. Also
pushing an API with no implementation doesn't really make sense since
the API is unusable until it is implemented in some hypervisor driver.
of the API until qemu stabilizes its interfaces (also, having the
libvirt API in place gives qemu an incentive to drop the x- prefix
sooner rather than later).
The presence of public API in libvirt gives no clue to QEMU engineers
that their API provides everything needed and x- prefix should be
dropped. Only working patches implementing the libvirt APIs for QEMU can
provide such feedback to QEMU developers.
Jirka