Re: [PATCH v18 00/18] KVM RISC-V Support

From: Paolo Bonzini
Date: Tue May 25 2021 - 04:24:24 EST


On 25/05/21 10:11, Greg KH wrote:
1) facilitate the development work overall, both for Paolo and Anup on the KVM
part, but also others to check that their changes do not break KVM support.

Who are the "others" here? You can't force your code into the tree just
to keep it up to date with internal apis that others are changing, if
you have no real users for it yet. That's asking others to do your work
for you:(

I don't know about changes that would break KVM support. However, "other KVM developers" would be able to check that their changes do not break the RISC-V implementation, and I would certainly either enforce that or do the work myself.

Also, excluding simulators and emulators from the set of "real users" ignores the needs of userspace developers, as well as other uses such as education/academia. Linux for x86 (both KVM and bare metal) supports features that are only available in emulators and simulators which are not even free software. I am pretty sure that there would be more users of KVM/RISC-V than with KVM/MIPS, despite the latter having support in real hardware.

Paolo