Re: [PATCH 0/3] Remove deprecated machines pc-i440fx-2.4 up to pc-i440fx-2.12

[Thomas Huth]

On 17/01/2025 12.07, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 17, 2025 at 11:27:35AM +0100, Thomas Huth wrote:
> > While our new auto-disablement of old machine types will only kick
> > in with the next (v10.1) release, the pc-i440fx-2.* machine types
> > have been explicitly marked as deprecated via our old deprecation
> > policy mechanism before (two releases ago), so it should be fine to
> > remove them now already.
>
> These were marked deprecated manually in 9.1.0 with:
>
>    commit 792b4fdd4eb8197bd6eb9e80a1dfaf0cb3b54aeb
>    Author: Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@linaro.org>
>    Date:   Wed Feb 28 10:34:35 2024 +0100
>
>      hw/i386/pc: Deprecate 2.4 to 2.12 pc-i440fx machines
>      
>      Similarly to the commit c7437f0ddb "docs/about: Mark the
>      old pc-i440fx-2.0 - 2.3 machine types as deprecated",
>      deprecate the 2.4 to 2.12 machines.
>
> but that commit was reverted a couple of weeks later in 9.1.0 dev

No, we did not revert that commit, the text is still there, so I think it 
still applies.

> when I added the automatic deprecation/deletion logic
>
>    commit 37193b7b43b6a973e56fa115098c5895ebdc7145
>    Author: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com>
>    Date:   Thu Jun 20 17:57:41 2024 +0100
>
>      hw/i386: remove obsolete manual deprecation reason string of i440fx 
> machines
>
> IOW, in terms of releases, these deprecations were introduced under
> the new policy rather than the old policy.

Why should your generic policy override an explicit statement for those 
machines?

> > Note that we can not do much additional clean ups on top yet since
> > the corresponding q35 machines (which share the same compatibility knobs)
> > are still around and only will be removed for the 10.1 release instead.
> > So the bigger clean-up can only be done for 10.1, but removing the i440fx
> > machine types now will still have at least a small benefit of accelerating
> > our CI a little bit (since we don't have to run tests for these old machine
> > types anymore).
>
> FYI Philippe had a series removing i440fx 2.4 & 2.5 which includes alot of
> the extra cleanups:

Sure, I saw it, but since you question whether we can already start removing 
the q35 machines for 10.0, we cannot do the extra clean-ups yet. But in my 
opinion, we could at least start removing the i440fx machines that have an 
explicit deprecation statement.

 Thomas