I think that a device model with support for devices in shared libraries combined with dynamic definition of the simulated HW would be great to be able to support a large number of HW variants in QEmu.
I have developed several full system simulators for large embedded systems, and we have always ended up with a systems with a very small component runtime combined with a script based description of the system to simulate. All parts of the system except the component loading and instantiation was implemented as dynamically loaded components. I have worked on implementations that use a pure C based component model as well as systems that supports both C and C++ bindings for interface implementation.
I have not been able to find any information about the proposed Bochs component model. Stanislav: where can I find any information about the Bochs plugin architecture that you talk about?
Among the open source component frameworks i guess that XPCOM used in the Mozilla products is one of the most interesting. It currently support C++, Python and Java bindings but it can easily support C as well.
/Einar
I strongly support the idea of being able to use shared objects to be
able to have a more dynamic device model; I can work on moving some of
the drivers over to whatever new model that you figure out.
It'd be nice too to have a dynamic board definition. For instance,
being able to describe in a configuration file a board with some odd
configuration (eg. 10 serial port, no IDE controller) without
recompiling would be helpful. I'm not sure what kind of file format's
appropriate.
The number of supported devices on QEMU is going to explode... Having a
good scalable architecture is going to be very useful.
- Alex