On 08/03/2010 09:43 PM, Avi Kivity wrote:
Really, the bar on new interfaces (both to guest and host) should be high, much higher than it is now. Interfaces should be well documented, future proof, migration safe, and orthogonal to existing interfaces. While the first three points could be improved with some effort, adding a new dma interface is not going to be orthogonal to virtio. And frankly, libguestfs is better off switching to one of the other interfaces. Slurping huge initrds isn't the right way to do this.
btw, precedent should play no role here. Just because an older interfaces wasn't documented or migration safe or unit-tested doesn't mean new ones get off the hook.
It does help to have a framework in place that we can point people at, for example I added a skeleton Documentation/kvm/api.txt and some unit tests and then made contributors fill them in for new features.
-- I have a truly marvellous patch that fixes the bug which this signature is too narrow to contain.
