[Libosinfo] RFC: Add clock/timers info in osinfo-db

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2019 at 02:56:44PM +0100, Martin Sivak wrote:
> > - Revisit Features/Timers after having a clear idea about the Profiles
> > work started by Martin Kletzander.
> >
> > Does that sound like a deal?
> 
> Except the workload profiles are trying to solve a different thing
> there (application specific needs on top of guest OS).
> 
> Pure libOSinfo is about what a guest OS supports and what the
> application _independent_ defaults for the guest OS should be. And the
> timers are mostly that (at least RHV always used them like that). The
> features we want are 100% that and have definitely nothing to do with
> workload profiles. Some of that information is architecture dependent
> though but libosinfo apparently knows how to handle this aspect
> already.
> 
> Hypervisor feature support has also nothing to do with workload
> profiles and maybe we need a separate database for hypervisor features
> :)
> 
> For those reasons I would gently ask to keep those discussions
> separate as both hypervisor and workload definitions are specific to
> integrator, environment and product (downstream RHV has its own qemu
> with extra patches for example).

My view on what profiles are for differs from this. In particular
I do *not* consider the profiles to be application specific. The
core rationale for libosinfo existing is to have information that
is shared by all applications managing VMs. Data that is application
specific should be maintained by the application in whatever manner
it wants - application specific data is not in scope for libosinfo.

I consider profiles to be a way of expressing the best practice
recommendations for configuring a virtual machine to satisfy some
declared scenario. This covers data that is specific to a hypervisor,
or a (guest,hypervisor) pairing, potentially taking into account
goals for runtime performance, as well as other aspects that might
be relevant. A particular application may have particular scenarios
it wants covered by profiles, but that doesn't mean the profiles
are application specific or restricted to only care about "workload",

Regards,
Daniel
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