As of April 23 2022, Ubuntu 20.04 will be out for two years, which means
we no longer have to support Ubuntu 18.04 along with qemu-2.11 shipped
with it.

This then brings the minimum qemu version we have to support to
qemu-3.1:

   Debian 10/Stable: 3.1
 OpenSUSE Leap 15.3: 5.2
       Ubuntu 20.04: 4.2
    RHEL/Centos 8.4: 4.2

Next event in this space will be 2023/07/06 when Debian 11 will be out
for two years.

Signed-off-by: Peter Krempa <pkrempa@redhat.com>
---
 docs/drvqemu.rst             | 6 +++---
 src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c | 4 ++--
 2 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

diff --git a/docs/drvqemu.rst b/docs/drvqemu.rst
index cfe4473951..6368a91fb9 100644
--- a/docs/drvqemu.rst
+++ b/docs/drvqemu.rst
@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@
 QEMU/KVM/HVF hypervisor driver
 ==============================

-The libvirt KVM/QEMU driver can manage any QEMU emulator from version 2.11.0 or
+The libvirt KVM/QEMU driver can manage any QEMU emulator from version 3.1.0 or
 later.

 It supports multiple QEMU accelerators: software
@@ -34,8 +34,8 @@ Deployment pre-requisites
    ``qemu-kvm`` and ``/dev/kvm`` device node. If both are found, then KVM fully
    virtualized, hardware accelerated guests will be available.
 -  **Hypervisor.framework (HVF)**: The driver will probe ``sysctl`` for the
-   presence of ``Hypervisor.framework``. If it is found and QEMU is newer than
-   2.12, then it will be possible to create hardware accelerated guests.
+   presence of ``Hypervisor.framework``. If it is found it will be possible to
+   create hardware accelerated guests.

 Connections to QEMU driver
 --------------------------
diff --git a/src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c b/src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c
index 25d029d0cc..e10035ee13 100644
--- a/src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c
+++ b/src/qemu/qemu_capabilities.c
@@ -5371,8 +5371,8 @@ virQEMUCapsProbeQMPSchemaCapabilities(virQEMUCaps *qemuCaps,
     return 0;
 }

-#define QEMU_MIN_MAJOR 2
-#define QEMU_MIN_MINOR 11
+#define QEMU_MIN_MAJOR 3
+#define QEMU_MIN_MINOR 1
 #define QEMU_MIN_MICRO 0

 virDomainVirtType
-- 
2.35.1

On Mon, Apr 04, 2022 at 10:35:25AM +0200, Peter Krempa wrote:
> As of April 23 2022, Ubuntu 20.04 will be out for two years, which means
> we no longer have to support Ubuntu 18.04 along with qemu-2.11 shipped
> with it.
>
> This then brings the minimum qemu version we have to support to
> qemu-3.1:
>
>    Debian 10/Stable: 3.1
>  OpenSUSE Leap 15.3: 5.2
>        Ubuntu 20.04: 4.2
>     RHEL/Centos 8.4: 4.2
>
> Next event in this space will be 2023/07/06 when Debian 11 will be out
> for two years.

It's actually much earlier than that :)

Quoting our platform support policy[1]:

  The project aims to support the most recent major version at all
  times. Support for the previous major version will be dropped 2
  years after the new major version is released or when the vendor
  itself drops support, whichever comes first. In this context,
  third-party efforts to extend the lifetime of a distro are not
  considered, even when they are endorsed by the vendor (e.g. Debian
  LTS); the same is true of repositories that contain packages
  backported from later releases (e.g. Debian backports).

Looking at the Debian wiki[2] we can see

  Version   Code name   Release date   End of life date
       10      Buster     2019-07-06           ~2022-08

which is consistent with what's written a few lines down

  Reminder: the EOL date for the stable release is the date of the
  next stable release plus one year.

So come August we'll be able to bump the minimum QEMU version
further, all the way to 4.2 :)


[1] https://libvirt.org/platforms.html
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases#Production_Releases
-- 
Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization

On Mon, Apr 04, 2022 at 08:35:55 -0700, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 04, 2022 at 10:35:25AM +0200, Peter Krempa wrote:
> > As of April 23 2022, Ubuntu 20.04 will be out for two years, which means
> > we no longer have to support Ubuntu 18.04 along with qemu-2.11 shipped
> > with it.
> >
> > This then brings the minimum qemu version we have to support to
> > qemu-3.1:
> >
> >    Debian 10/Stable: 3.1
> >  OpenSUSE Leap 15.3: 5.2
> >        Ubuntu 20.04: 4.2
> >     RHEL/Centos 8.4: 4.2
> >
> > Next event in this space will be 2023/07/06 when Debian 11 will be out
> > for two years.
> 
> It's actually much earlier than that :)
> 
> Quoting our platform support policy[1]:
> 
>   The project aims to support the most recent major version at all
>   times. Support for the previous major version will be dropped 2
>   years after the new major version is released or when the vendor
>   itself drops support, whichever comes first. In this context,
>   third-party efforts to extend the lifetime of a distro are not
>   considered, even when they are endorsed by the vendor (e.g. Debian
>   LTS); the same is true of repositories that contain packages
>   backported from later releases (e.g. Debian backports).
> 
> Looking at the Debian wiki[2] we can see
> 
>   Version   Code name   Release date   End of life date
>        10      Buster     2019-07-06           ~2022-08
> 
> which is consistent with what's written a few lines down
> 
>   Reminder: the EOL date for the stable release is the date of the
>   next stable release plus one year.

Oh, I didn't notice that and somehow assumed that we'd have to apply our
policy of 2 years.

> So come August we'll be able to bump the minimum QEMU version
> further, all the way to 4.2 :)

That is awesome news. I'm really looking forward to delete all
pre-blockdev disk code!!