I am a great fan of QEMU, and have used it more or less continuously for the past 2+ years. Over that time I've installed and operated various Linux and Windows guests with varying degrees of success.
The recently released 0.9.0 seems a big step forward in the stability/usability department, which is excellent. But there are still residual worries -- for example, qcow2 images corrupted for no obvious reason -- which, whilst a boring problem, is important for folks like me who want to run VMs 24x7 with the hope of complete reliability. Pretty much all mature projects which have achieved widespread usage have one or more stable branches along with the main development branch (trunk). Think GCC, the kernel, KDE, ... the list is endless. Maintaining a stable branch is extra hassle and overhead, but it is the standard way to operate, for reasons which are obvious: the majority of users care more about stability, reliability and usability than they do about the latest new features, and delivering stability from a branch used for bleeding-edge development work is pretty much impossible. That is not, of course, a criticism of the bleeding edge developers, since it is they who ultimately drive the project along. I am writing to propose that a stable branch be made from the 0.9.0 release point. The aim would be to maximise stability for (IMO) the subset of functionality that has the largest potential user base: i386-softmmu + Accelerator and x86_64-softmmu + Accelerator, but excluding -kernel-kqemu due to limitations described in http://qemu.org/kqemu-doc.html#SEC7. Subsequent releases of the branch would contain no functionality enhancements, but just bug fixes, with the eventual aim of achieving 'it just works' status for any x86/x86_64 guest I try to install/run. I know that's a tall order, and that 0.9.0 may not be able to supply that for all guests. But it is an important goal to strive for. My impression is that (at least as I perceive it) the lack of emphasis on maximising stability on a stable branch, and the lack of a bug tracker, is artificially restricting QEMU's user base, and therefore indirectly its long term prospects. This is a shame, because QEMU is a very remarkable and useful project, which should be used (and usable) by everybody and anybody. J _______________________________________________ Qemu-devel mailing list Qemu-devel@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel
