[PATCH 08/17] qemu: Formally deprecate support for qemu < 3.1

[Andrea Bolognani]

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