Well, they have reasonable documentation for certain external APIs (syscalls, boot parameters, sysfs files, etc). But not internal API documentation or "formal design".
Certain things are sketched and outlined, and certain things have detailed documentation, but as a whole there is no "formal design" of the system.
It's not really bonkers though because it turns out that formal designs doesn't necessarily make better software. Or rather, the formal designs that academia might have taught. There is a formal design, it's the code.
20 or 30 years ago, there was this big push that formal designs should be the key piece of work and you should be able to press a button and generate the application from the design automatically. Turns out they were so wrong they basically went 360 back to right again and that's what we do. It's just that the design doesn't look like some crazy incomprehensible executable-UML, but programming languages. Which are quite legible, precise, and unambiguous (at least compared to English), and make very good languages to write designs in.
(The place where they are still wrong of is that you don't need to know or care about any of the fine detail in order to make a good design. Once you accept that, then specifying the design with code is pretty reasonable.)
Indeed, I was going to point out the lack for KVM as well. The same is also very true when it comes to Linux networking stuff. One of the most difficult things I've ever had to do was complicated networking stuff with KVM/qemu VMs when I had nobody to ask or talk to about it. There are enormous swaths of undocumented surface (or lightly documented by a blog post that may or may not be accurate anymore, and is nowhere near comprehensive). One of my biggest hope for LLMs like GPT-4 is the ability to improve on this, though as of right now it hallucinates like mad. The more niche the case, the worse it gets too.
Well, every time this line of thinking comes up, I don't believe there is a gofundme, indiegogo, patreon, etc to which I could donate. Because I for sure think that would be a good investment for future generations, but you are correct that I almost certainly couldn't convince my employer to spend the money. I'd guess that's partially because they don't directly benefit from qemu, setting aside the daily use of buildkit which for sure does. Come to think of it, I'd guess Docker(Mirantis?) is BY FAR the most "you really, really should be a corporate sponsor" of qemu
starspangled|1 year ago
Well, they have reasonable documentation for certain external APIs (syscalls, boot parameters, sysfs files, etc). But not internal API documentation or "formal design".
Certain things are sketched and outlined, and certain things have detailed documentation, but as a whole there is no "formal design" of the system.
It's not really bonkers though because it turns out that formal designs doesn't necessarily make better software. Or rather, the formal designs that academia might have taught. There is a formal design, it's the code.
20 or 30 years ago, there was this big push that formal designs should be the key piece of work and you should be able to press a button and generate the application from the design automatically. Turns out they were so wrong they basically went 360 back to right again and that's what we do. It's just that the design doesn't look like some crazy incomprehensible executable-UML, but programming languages. Which are quite legible, precise, and unambiguous (at least compared to English), and make very good languages to write designs in.
(The place where they are still wrong of is that you don't need to know or care about any of the fine detail in order to make a good design. Once you accept that, then specifying the design with code is pretty reasonable.)
freedomben|1 year ago
pm215|1 year ago
mdaniel|1 year ago