Open Stack

So.. I just discovered I had a mail misconfiguration which meant at
least one recent message I sent to the list on the govmm stuff didn't
get through.  Which probably explains why I had a different idea of
what was going on that other people seem to have had.

I proposed the integration of govmm into the Kata repository for two
reasons:

 1) To avoid the back and forth of synchronized govmm & Kata changes
 2) To avoid maintaining another external interface

When I first pitched it to Fabiano I had the impression that Kata was
the only user of govmm making it an internal interface in practice, so
(1) was the main motivation.  Having discovered that's not the case,
though, (2) is really the more important factor.  The Kata team really
doesn't have the resources to maintain a general VMM interface - which
is in fact an extremely difficult problem (witness the complexity of
libvirt).  It's made more difficult by the fact that there's not
really a natural API boundary in between qemu itself and Kata's
hypervisor interface, so what is and isn't in govmm is already pretty
arbitrary and based on Kata's needs.

AIUI, at the last AC meeting, the decision was made to move govmm into
the kata-containers repo, encouraging external users to consume it
from the new location.  That addresses (1), but not (2), since it's
still effectively an external interface.  It makes the dilineation of
that interface even less clear than it already is.

So, I really think this is a bad approach.  Instead, what I believe we
should do is leave the govmm repository as is, but orphaned, for
external users.  They can take up maintenance of it, if they have the
interest.  For Kata, I think we should simply fork the current govmm
state, removing any parts we don't need, and in future make no attempt
to keep it as anything but an internal interface tailored for Kata's
needs.  I believe this will let us make some significant
simplifications.

My issue and pull request (#2393 and #2395) were made with the latter
approach in mind, and I'm presently holding off on merging until we're
clear on how we're proceding here.

-- 
David Gibson			| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
				| _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson
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