Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/872321/rss

There are many barriers to producing software that is reliable and
maintainable over the long term. One of those is software complexity. At
the recently concluded 2021 KVM
Forum, Paolo Bonzini
explored
this topic, using QEMU, the open source emulator
and virtualizer, as a case study. Drawing on his experience as
a maintainer of several QEMU subsystems, he made some concrete
suggestions on how to defend against undesirable complexity. Bonzini
used QEMU as a running example throughout the talk, hoping to make it
easier for future contributors to modify QEMU. However, the
lessons he shared are equally applicable to many other projects.