Re: [PATCH for-9.0] docs/about: Mark the iaspc machine type as deprecated

On Tue, 26 Mar 2024 14:29:58 +0100 Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd(a)linaro.org&gt; wrote: it would not be fair to ask you or Bernard to deal with every case where ISAPC related code gets in a way, nor it's fair to ask other contributors to ensure that their patches don't break semi-working ISAPC or refactor code that relates to it. [ for example I'd like to refactor smbios parts in the image ACPI table builder, but the I'd have to do it for legacy part as well without means to verify that. Sure it can be done but at cost of extra time spent to rewrite something that would never be used and to find test env to verify touched code. ] However I look at it, isapc is burden at this point and it gets into a way of evolving. [downstream hat] while both of you do a wonderful job of separating some parts of the mess we have, it's a lot of churn which is not ideal when it comes to backporting patches. [emotional hat] Nowadays with modern containers tooling it's very easy to spawn old qemu environment to play with removed machines/features. quick few minutes example that lets me run isapc on old ubuntu without need to read how to build containers in 100 different ways: toolbox create --distro ubuntu --release 22.04 toolbox enter ubuntu-toolbox-22.04 toolbox enter ubuntu-toolbox-22.04 [user@toolbox ~]$ sudo apt update [user@toolbox ~]$ sudo apt install qemu-system-x86 [user@toolbox ~]$ qemu-system-i386 -M isapc -vnc :0 my_toy.qcow2 PS: I haven't had high hopes of this getting accepted, but I had to try. Though recent trend was that upstream QEMU were deprecating/dropping old machines/devices (even ones that kernel folks were using for testing) and it hasn't caused the end of universe (old qemu(s) sill exists and can be used for those cases).