block: deprecate the sheepdog block driver

This thread from a little over a year ago:

  http://lists.wpkg.org/pipermail/sheepdog/2019-March/thread.html

states that sheepdog is no longer actively developed. The only mentioned
users are some companies who are said to have it for legacy reasons with
plans to replace it by Ceph. There is talk about cutting out existing
features to turn it into a simple demo of how to write a distributed
block service. There is no evidence of anyone working on that idea:

  https://github.com/sheepdog/sheepdog/commits/master

No real commits to git since Jan 2018, and before then just some minor
technical debt cleanup.

There is essentially no activity on the mailing list aside from
patches to QEMU that get CC'd due to our MAINTAINERS entry.

Fedora packages for sheepdog failed to build from upstream source
because of the more strict linker that no longer merges duplicate
global symbols. Fedora patches it to add the missing "extern"
annotations and presumably other distros do to, but upstream source
remains broken.

There is only basic compile testing, no functional testing of the
driver.

Since there are no build pre-requisites the sheepdog driver is currently
enabled unconditionally. This would result in configure issuing a
deprecation warning by default for all users. Thus the configure default
is changed to disable it, requiring users to pass --enable-sheepdog to
build the driver.

Reviewed-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy <vsementsov@virtuozzo.com>
Reviewed-by: Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <20201002113243.2347710-3-berrange@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Neal Gompa <ngompa13@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/docs/system/deprecated.rst b/docs/system/deprecated.rst
index 09ec8b1ae8..2ac3bfd5e9 100644
--- a/docs/system/deprecated.rst
+++ b/docs/system/deprecated.rst
@@ -390,6 +390,15 @@ The above, converted to the current supported format::
 
   json:{"file.driver":"rbd", "file.pool":"rbd", "file.image":"name"}
 
+``sheepdog`` driver (since 5.2.0)
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+The ``sheepdog`` block device driver is deprecated. The corresponding upstream
+server project is no longer actively maintained. Users are recommended to switch
+to an alternative distributed block device driver such as RBD. The
+``qemu-img convert`` command can be used to liberate existing data by moving
+it out of sheepdog volumes into an alternative storage backend.
+
 linux-user mode CPUs
 --------------------