[libvirt] [PATCH 0/7] Drop support for QEMU < 0.12.0

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Nov 05, 2015 at 11:05:53AM -0700, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 11/05/2015 10:47 AM, Cole Robinson wrote:
> > On 11/05/2015 12:33 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >> The patches for introducing virtlogd will be significantly
> >> simplified if we don't need to worry about parsing stderr
> >> during startup. This is required prior to QEMU 0.11 so
> >> that we can get the dyanamically allocated /dev/pty/NNN
> >> paths.
> >>
> >> The QEMU 0.12.1 release was shipped in RHEL-6 vintage
> >> distros and is already quite old, so seems like a fair
> >> target version to aim for as the minimum required.
> >>
> > 
> > Up next... drop support for building on RHEL-5 ? :) Would mean we could
> > simplify the RPM spec quite a bit
> 
> Upstream qemu 2.4 has already effectively dropped support for RHEL 5,
> and the upcoming qemu 2.5 takes that even further by bumping minimum
> glib and python requirements so that it is no longer possible to develop
> qemu out of the box on RHEL 5.
> 
> My argument is that libvirt should be buildable out of the box on any
> platform where its underlying hypervisor support is also buildable out
> of the box, as follows:

As a second criteria I also tend to consider what phase of life the
OS vendor considers the platform to be in.  ie even if QEMU had gone
further and dropped RHEL-6, I would still consider RHEL-6 a valid
target because it is still very much in the production phase of its
lifecycle. Only once a platform is locked down into critical bug fix
only stage, it is valid to consider discontinuing it in libvirt too

> So I would be in favor of dropping RHEL 5 as an out-of-the-box build
> platform for upstream libvirt.

Regards,
Daniel
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