The current implementation of the feature gates in the HCO API was designed so the user will not need to deal with the right spelling of each KubeVirt’s feature gate name. Also, we wanted to let the user change only a subset of the KubeVirt FGs.

There are two issue with the current structure of the spec.featureGates field:

• The field was re-used for HCO enablers that are not feature gates. This approach is confusing and misleading. For example, the EnableCommonBootImageImport feature gate used to enable part of the golden image feature, but this is actually not a feature gate and has never been. This is just an enabler.
• Not all KubeVirt field fields in spec.featureGates are still relevant. For example,  the WithHostPassthroughCPU feature gate was added to HCO a few years ago, but eventually was never added to KubeVirt itself. This is in HCO documentation, and HCO will add it to KubeVirt CR if it will be set in HCO CR, but it does nothing and is ignored by KubeVirt. 

This epic details several changes to the current Feature Gates API, and the steps to implement the change.