On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 4:11 PM Sean Christopherson <seanjc@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Oct 20, 2021, Amy Parker wrote:
> > Hello all.
> >
> > Has the idea of having a staging subdirectory for KVM been proposed before?
>
> Not that I know of.
Alright, thank you for clarification.
>
> > It could become a buffer place for KVM features currently in development/not
> > production ready, but that should be able to be conditionally included into
> > the kernel. With a staging directory, these features would be divorced from
> > KVM mainline, but would be able to be rolled out promptly to users while they
> > are being refined.
>
> Can you give an example?
>
> I'm struggling to envision a feature that is both large enough to warrant
> "staging", yet isolated enough to actually be "divorced from KVM mainline".
> One of the rules for staging/drivers is that the drivers are standalone and don't
> require changes to the kernel proper outside of docs, firmware, and perhaps
> exports.
I can think of three categories of implementations:
1. Supporting new hardware virtualization technologies, which may take
a while to develop but should still be available to users for testing
and non-production purposes while being refined, such as on new
architectures or by new manufacturers. It's entirely possible that
there will be new competitors in the x86_64 space soon, especially
with the increasing popularity of the concept of 128-bit computing
architectures.
2. Experimental algorithms which optimize current functions; these may
not be immediately production-ready, but should be available to the
end user in something like the staging folder.
3. Other future virtualization technologies, should they ever be
added, such as cross-binary architecture and syscall compatibility.
- amyip
