Re: Where should the vhost-user specification live?

"Michael S. Tsirkin" <[email protected]> writes:

> On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 10:13:47AM +0100, Alex Benn=C3=A9e wrote:
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>> Hi,
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>> Apologies for the wide cross-posting but I wanted to find as many
>> interested parties as possible.
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>> The vhost-user specification currently lives in the main qemu
>> repository (docs/interop/vhost-user.rst) mainly due to historical
>> reasons. QEMU was one of the first VMMs to implement vhost-user and the
>> spec needed to live somewhere.
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>> However there are now vhost-user implementations for QEMU, rust-vmm,
>> cloud hypervisor and I think CrosVM. We get queries about changing or
>> updating the spec on qemu-devel from time to time and I feel that given
>> it is an interoperability specification we should think about hosting
>> it and its discussions elsewhere.
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>> I think broadly there are 4 options:
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>>   *  Move into the OASIS VirtIO group as an appendix/addendum to the main
>>      VirtIO spec.
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>>      This probably brings the widest visibility to changes to those that
>>      might be affected. However it does come with a certain amount of
>>      bureaucracy with the OASIS process where only members can vote on
>>      changes. While intimately tied to VirtIO it's concerns are more
>>      focused on practical implementation details of the IPC between VMMs
>>      and device backends.
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>>   * Move to a separate project under the qemu-project space.
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>>     QEMU hosts a number of sub-projects and mirrors so it would be easy
>>     enough to split the spec into its own repo. Changes to the
>>     specification could then be divorced from QEMU's release cycle and
>>     at the maintainers option issues and merging strategies could be
>>     configured for just the specification.
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>>   * Create a new project just for vhost-user
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>>     The interested parties could decide where to host (github, gitlab,
>>     forgejo, whatever..) and decide to move away from mailing lists
>>     altogether or create a mailing list but manage changes via the forge
>>     interface.
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>>   * Status quo
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>>     Just keep the spec where it is and muddle through as before. Maybe
>>     we could improve the contribution documentation for how and when
>>     changes are discussed.
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>> Any thoughts?
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>> --=20
>> Alex Benn=C3=A9e
>> Virtualisation Tech Lead @ Linaro
>
> I think what is missing here is what are the pros for any of the
> proposed changed?  What are the issues we are trying to solve?
> What 'queries about changing or updating the spec' were problematic?

I was referring to:

  https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/20260522-vhost-user-dev-v1-1-b31646cf1=
[email protected]

when Demi proposed discussing at the QEMU/KVM community call meeting and
it occurred to me changes to vhost-user affect more than QEMU these days.

>
> Thanks,

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Alex Benn=C3=A9e
Virtualisation Tech Lead @ Linaro