[josephcsible]

> It already supports a number of obscure options (you can make QEMU claim to support a CPU feature regardless of whether the host CPU supports it, really?), so adding one more woild fit in just fine.

> Nope. “there are no plans to address it further or fix it in an upcoming release”.

<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1408810>

I could see that being the response of an individual open-source developer working for free. But that was IBM saying that, and people pay big bucks to IBM to fix things like this.

[rwmj]

It's a bug filed against RHEL 7 originally, by someone working at Red Hat, who suggested that we add the qemu disable-io feature to libvirt. There was no customer case behind either the original RHEL 7 bug nor this cloned RHEL 8 bug, so we simply didn't think it was important to implement this, and 5 years after the original bug was filed, with no customer coming along nor anyone having done the work upstream, the bug was auto-closed.

However if someone came along and did the work upstream to fix it, I'm sure that would be accepted.

Or if a customer turned up who wanted this, that would also be implemented.

[emmelaich]

WONTFIX sounds so final.

Though, reading the closing comment, this is really CLOSED-WONTFIXYET, as in no plans.

Maybe it'd be nice to introduce a WONTFIXYET. Might be useful to fossick among features abandoned that someday become feasible.

[adastra22]

Yeah WONTFIX implies will not accept patches in every project I've worked on.

[broodbucket]

Lucky they're not the ones accepting patches. If upstream adopts it they'd have to disable support in their build, which seems unlikely.

I wouldn't read WONTFIX like that for anything downstream (i.e. a distribution bug tracker for projects they package). It's we won't do it, not noone else can. WONTFIX only means WONTFIX if that's in the one true source of the project, i.e. upstream.

RH usually have a lot of not-upstream patches though (at least they do for the kernel, grub, and qemu, so I assume the same for libvirt) which complicates things a bit.

[bonzini]

> Lucky they're not the ones accepting patches. If upstream adopts it they'd have to disable support in their build, which seems unlikely.

Upstream libvirt would probably be Red Hat employees. :) It would not be disabled in the RHEL build, but note that Red Hat does disable a lot of features of QEMU in RHEL. About this:

> RH usually have a lot of not-upstream patches though (at least they do for the kernel, grub, and qemu, so I assume the same for libvirt) which complicates things a bit.

Most of the patches in kernel and QEMU are backports from upstream.

For QEMU there are 20-30 patches not-upstream patches and they're mostly configuration. For the kernel it's a bit more but not many, and Libvirt probably has even fewer.

[Tyr42]

We usually use "Open, P4" (0 is highest. 2 is standard) for unscheduled work.

[emmelaich]

Some people strongly dislike "open" for anything not being worked on or having plans to work on. And I've come to agree to that. You just do not want it showing up in backlogs at all.

[Volundr]

I'm expect if it comes from one of their $X million support contracts their answer will be very different.

[bombcar]

You’d like to think so but often even at that level you’re paying for it not to be your fault.

Now if your CTO golfs with an exec at IBM, you might get somewhere.

[janosdebugs]

At Red Hat, this would usually mostly be a PM+dev+QE decision, not C level. If C level got involved, that meant massive customer impairment. There are simply too many open bugs to spend time on something that no customer is apparently interested in, but if a customer came along with a big burning problem and there was no way for them to architect around it, they'd usually fix something like this.

When I worked at Red Hat (virtualization-related, but not libvirt) we had a case where a customer would be running a configuration which was... unwise. We still spent a lot of time figuring out how to help them and shipped a patch that made their life easier.

The people working there are not evil, they don't intentionally not fix things, but a bug that is seen as a minor limitation and hasn't popped up in any customer case in 5+ years simply won't get fixed. There hundreds if not thousands of other bugs that are more urgent and only so many developers, QE engineers, docs people to work on this. Even if someone wrote a patch for it, it may not get merged due to how expensive Red Hats process for shipping a change is.

[qingcharles]

Ooo, I gotta start playing golf. That might be the way I can get some support for my Gmail account.

"If posting to Hacker News doesn't get your support query fixed, book 9 holes with the board members."

[matheusmoreira]

I really need to get off gmail as soon as possible.

[worthless-trash]

Obvious solution is to get friendly with the package maintainer, find a security vulnerability in the anti-feature you need, lodge security bug, get a CVE, and ask real nicely an upgrade to include the feature^H^H^H^H^H^H^ fix you need.

On a serious note, I deal with bug fix / feature requests regularly in Z-Stream (kernel) in an almost weekly cadence, getting the patch upstream, getting the request to backport, making an adequate test of the feature.

Source: Worked in product security for little red, now big blue.

[josephcsible]

Having worked for an organization with one of said $X million support contracts with IBM, it often is not.

[adastra22]

What is the point of the support contract then?

[klodolph]

There are a lot of various points to support contracts. Support contracts are not “fix any bug” or “implement any feature”, but…

- With a support contract, there are SLAs to respond to incidents / bugs within a timely manner, and

- You have a clear escalation path to talk to engineers, rather than customer service, and

- While you can’t dictate what features / bugs will get fixed, you do have some weight for prioritization.

If you have no support contract, then you may not be able to talk to engineers at all, your bug reports may get completely ignored (not even looked at), etc.

[adastra22]

Yeah but if the response to your bug report is "WONTFIX", it doesn't much matter if you got that reply in a timely manner. It still does you absolutely no good.

[klodolph]

I don’t understand what kind of point you’re making here.

Are you saying that support contracts are completely worthless because some bugs are closed WONTFIX?

B2B generally does not run on the “let’s screw our customers as much as possible” model. Of course, some do—companies like IBM and Oracle are famously extractive, and cloud providers are trying their best to bait you into getting locked into their cloud.

But in a typical B2B scenario, the support contract is the entry price for having real people read your bug reports and respond in a timely fashion. That’s the starting point, and from there, the bug will get fixed, or you’ll get connected to a “customer support engineer” or someone that will tell you that you’re using the product wrong, or you’ll be given a workaround. Without the support contract, you don’t get the workarounds, you don’t get the fixes, and you don’t get the contact with engineers. You just get to figure it out on your own. Yeah, a percentage of bugs get closed WONTFIX. That’s normal. Yeah, the contract may only require a response and not a fix. The actual practice is that you get some bugs fixed, and some not, and that’s a lot better than your bug reports going straight into the trash.

[janosdebugs]

For Red Hat, there are bugs and there are customer cases. The two are not the same, but they are linked internally. Customer cases don't deal with "X functionality doesn't work in libvirt", but rather a higher level issue that the customer can't resolve due to the underlying bug. Here a workaround the customer can live with is a perfectly acceptable solution.

In my time I was there I never saw a bug closed as WONTFIX unless the customer case was resolved in a satisfactory manner. Red Hat people are very aware who's paying the bills. I have seen badly managed escalations, but I've never seen anyone taking customer problems lightly. However, bugs that have no customer case attached to them carry very little weight unless an engineer, a PM, etc says that this is really bad and will cause problems in the future.

This is part of where the disconnect comes from. Red Hat prides itself in being an open source company, but it is first and foremost a customer-oriented company. Sure, often individual people will take time they have left and go fix something for the community, but if it's something more involved, it will need PM and management support. Benefiting from and also providing their customers with open source is simply part of the model that has worked for Red Hat, but nobody should be under the illusion that this is done for the greater good. Red Hat is a company and companies serve the purpose of making money for their shareholders. If this happens to align with the interests of the open source community, that's awesome, but will not always be the case. Over the past few years there have been numerous instances of that unfortunate reality.

Without knowing the specifics about libvirt's funding, if a project needs to be truly community-driven, the community must come up with a model that doesn't involve Red Hat paying a large portion of the salaries of the people involved, or it will be subject to Red Hat's business interests.

[justsomehnguy]

For the ability to point a finger at someone else. Otherwise you would pointing at yourself.

> it doesn't much matter if you got that reply in a timely manner

Compare "I can't do that" with "They wouldn't do that".

[gnufied]

> . I guess SeaBIOS can't figure out how to assign I/O space to all devices that want some, and so it simply gives up?

It appears that although for some devices VM works fine but for others the VM refuses to boot (esp e100)

So the answer might be more nuanced than it seems?

[chociej]

Those devices for which it works fine are such devices that don't request any I/O space

[wkat4242]

As redhat becomes more commercial it's imperative we don't let them be stewards of open source anymore. Too many times to their corporate strategy.

For example they took ownership of X11 only so they can let it die in favor of their preferred Wayland. While Wayland is not bad, it's not covering everything.

But anyway I don't really care anymore, I'm less and less invested in the Linux ecosystem. It's too commercial now, I just stick with the BSDs <3

[dark-star]

Because, if you read the report, suc an option is not needed: - if you disable IO port allocation and plug in a card that requires it, that card cannot possibly work - if you don't disable it but use only cards that don't require IO ports, you might get an error in your dmesg but the card will still work just fine

So, why would you need to specify this option in the first place?