Re: [Qemu-devel] Modular qemu?

[Avi Kivity]

Thiemo Seufer wrote:
> > What about non-plugin dlopen()?  Right now building qemu (with all  
> > options enabled) requires a large amount of libraries, hence a lot of  
> > dependencies.  For example, a server setup that will only be used with  
> > -vnc needs to have SDL installed.  This will only get worse with opengl  
> > support.
> >
> > I'm thinking of something similar to linux kernel modules: no backward  
> > compatible ABI, simply load-on-demand functionality that can be packaged  
> > separately to reduce dependencies.  With kvm integrated, we could even  
> > make the cpu emulator an optional loadable module.
> >     
>
> What problem would this solve?
>
>   

You build qemu once, but with separate sub-packages:

 qemu
 qemu-sdl
 qemu-vnc
 qemu-tcg
 qemu-kvm

On a desktop deployment, you install qemu, qemu-kvm, qemu-tcg, and 
qemu-sdl (which pulls a bunch of dependencies).  On a server deployment, 
you install qemu, qemu-vnc, and qemu-kvm (which avoids dependencies and 
the tcg code which is not useful on a server).  This allows a 
distribution to only maintain and support one qemu binary for different 
deployment scenarios.

We might even make the various targets loadable modules, so you have a 
single binary which supports a bunch of targets.  This is more difficult 
due to the large numbers of #defines, but is doable.

--
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