[SeaBIOS] qemu 1.7 & seabios -- release planning

[Gerd Hoffmann]

  Hi,

It's probably going to be a bit tough this time.  We are pretty late in
the qemu 1.7 devel cycle, soft freeze today, and a big chunk of code
(ahci-tables-from qemu) which needs seabios support[1] is just about to
be pulled.

That leaves only two weeks (with kvm forum in the middle!) until qemu
1.7 hard freeze with -rc0 (2013-10-29), which should ideally have a
seabios update so it can be tested in the rc phase.

There are two more interface updates (pass pcimem64-start address + e820
entries for ram regions) which would be good to get in while being at
it.

seabios patches are ready for the most part and just waiting for the
qemu counterparts to be merged first.

The timing constrains suggest we should tightly align the releases, with
seabios releases being a bit earlier, i.e. something like this:

  (1) merge pending qemu patches
  (2) merge pending seabios patches
  (3) tag -rc0 seabios release [asap, no later than 2013-10-28]
  (4) merge seabios update into qemu
  (5) qemu hard freeze, -rc0 release with seabios update [2013-10-29]
  (6) seabios freeze in parallel with qemu hard freeze
  (7) apply seabios fixes if needed.
  (8) tag final seabios release [targeting qemu -rc2 or -rc3 date here]
  (9) merge seabios bugfix update into qemu

Qemu 1.7 schedule is here: http://wiki.qemu.org/Planning/1.7

Comments?

cheers,
  Gerd

[1] Strictly speaking it isn't absolutely required, but would be very
    good to have.