[libvirt] RFC: Drop unmaintained hv drivers? (phyp, xenapi, hyperv)

[Cole Robinson]

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 at 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


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 at 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?


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 at 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.


Also, in general, I've never heard about anyone _actually_ using any of those
drivers in the wild. There's reports here and there but it mostly sounds like
people trying them out. Just an anecdote so take it with a grain of salt

- Cole