Package Stable KVM/QEMU Releases

The kvm/qemu upstream community is changing their release practices.

QEMU and KVM are two separate projects. Traditionally, KVM upstream has released a tarball which included a snapshot of QEMU from its source repository for the userspace virtualization pieces, plus a snapshot of the kvm kernel module source code.

This re-packaging of QEMU was necessary because QEMU was mostly unmaintained as a project and did not release regularly. However, this has changed recently, as it now has an active maintainer, and has moved to a time-based release schedule.

As such, upstream KVM will no longer be re-packaging VCS snapshots of QEMU. KVM releases should only contain the kernel module.

We will need to do a few things in Ubuntu to handle this properly in Karmic. We're going to need to clean up the QEMU package a bit as it stands in Universe and will need to be moved to Main. The kvm package should either then depend on QEMU, or perhaps subsume it entirely. The kvm-source package should be basically the same--a dkms build of the kvm module source code.

Furthermore, I strongly believe that Ubuntu should be tracking the "stable" git tree as established by the KVM and QEMU maintainers. I would like to basically freeze kvm/qemu on the latest stable release some time around Karmic Feature Freeze. There after, I'd like to sync all of the *bug fixes* as applied to that stable tree up until Beta Freeze.

In this way, I hope to keep KVM/QEMU as absolutely stable as possible, and very close to the upstream code for maintenance reasons.

:-Dustin