Re: [PATCH 1/2] i386/acpi: fix inconsistent QEMU/OVMF device paths

[Thomas Lamprecht <t.lamprecht@proxmox.com>]

On 01.03.21 15:20, Igor Mammedov wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Mar 2021 08:45:53 +0100
> Thomas Lamprecht <t.lamprecht@proxmox.com> wrote:
>> On 01.03.21 08:20, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
>>> There are various testing efforts the reason this got undetected is
>>> because it does not affect linux guests, and even for windows
>>> they kind of recover, there's just some boot slowdown around reconfiguration.
>>> Not easy to detect automatically given windows has lots of random
>>> downtime during boot around updates etc etc.
>>>   
>>
>> No, Windows does not reconfigure, this is a permanent change, one is just lucky
>> if one has a DHCP server around in the network accessible for the guest.
>> As static addresses setup on that virtual NIC before that config is gone,
>> no recovery whatsoever until manual intervention.
> Static IP's are the pain guest admin picked up to deal with so he might have to
> reconfigure guest OS when it decides to rename NICs. In this case moving
> to new QEMU is alike to updating BIOS which fixed PCI description.
> (On QEMU side we try to avoid breaking changes, but sometime it happens anyway
> and it's up guest admin to fix OS quirks)
> 

heh, I agree, but users see it very differently, QEMU got updated, something
stopped working/changed/... -> QEMU at fault.

>> I meant more of a "dump HW layout to .txt file, commit to git, and ensure
>> there's no diff without and machine version bump" (very boiled down), e.g., like
>> ABI checks for kernel builds are often done by distros - albeit those are easier
>> as its quite clear what and how the kernel ABI can be used.
> ACPI tables are not considered as ABI change in QEMU, technically tables that QEMU
> generates are firmware and not version-ed (same like we don't tie anything to
> specific firmware versions). 
> 
> However we rarely do version ACPI changes (only when it breaks something or
> we suspect it would break and we can't accept that breakage), this time it took
> a lot of time to find out that. We try to minimize such cases as every
> versioning knob adds up to maintenance.
> 
> For ACPI tables changes, QEMU has bios-tables-test, but it lets us to catch
> unintended changes only.
> Technically it's possible to keep master tables for old machine versions
> and test against it. But I'm not sure if we should do that, because some
> (most) changes are harmless or useful and should apply to all machine
> versions.
> So we will end up in the same situation, where we decide if a change
> should be versioned or not.
> 
> 

OK, fair enough. Many thanks for providing some rationale!