Re: Qemu-devel Digest, Vol 216, Issue 57

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Thu, Mar 04, 2021 at 10:07:16AM -0500, Programmingkid wrote:
> 
> 
> > On Mar 3, 2021, at 4:59 AM, qemu-devel-request@nongnu.org wrote:
> > 
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2021 10:22:50 +0100
> > From: Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>
> > To: Akihiko Odaki <akihiko.odaki@gmail.com>
> > Cc: qemu-devel@nongnu.org
> > Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] coreaudio: Drop support for macOS older than
> >     10.6
> > Message-ID: <20210303092250.x7j6kcyrv3qjghrl@sirius.home.kraxel.org>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> > 
> > On Mon, Mar 01, 2021 at 08:45:53PM +0900, Akihiko Odaki wrote:
> >> Mac OS X 10.6 was released in 2009.
> > 
> > Also minimum version required my qemu is 10.13 (I think),
> > so any code for older macos versions is dead anyway.
> > 
> > take care,
> >  Gerd
> 
> This stinks. Older versions of Mac OS X were perfectly fine for
> running QEMU on. All my intel Macs run  Mac OS X versions before
> 10.13. I'm thinking we should at least support Mac OS 10.10 and higher.

QEMU has to draw a line about how far back we attempt to support OS
platforms. There is a tradeoff between the maintainer burden of old
platforms, and how many users actually benefit from it. The older
the OS platform, the fewer users care about new QEMU, and thus the
benefit ceases to outweigh the costs to maintainers. IOW, we want
to spend maintainer resources in areas where we maximise the user
benefit.

QEMU aims to support the currently shipping major version at all
times, and the previous shippin major version for an additional
two years:

  https://qemu-project.gitlab.io/qemu/system/build-platforms.html

So from a macOS pov our support platform only guarantees that
we'll target macOS 11, and macOS 10.15 until Nov 2022 (2 years
after macOS 11 release date).  Earlier macOS versions may happen
to work too, but we're not going to guarantee that or go out of
our way to ensure it continues to be the cast.

This will certainly make some people unhappy if they're using old
OS platforms, but we believe this is ultimately better for the
QEMU userbase as a whole to focus on platforms where we benefit
the largest set of people.

Since this is open source, users of old platforms always have the
choice of using many existing releases of QEMU, even once latest
QEMU release drops a platform.

Regards,
Daniel
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