Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] eepro100: Add more i825xx devices

[Anthony Liguori]

Stefan Weil wrote:
> Anthony Liguori schrieb:
>   
> > Stefan Weil wrote:
> >     
> > > Anthony, you asked me to send my maintainer version from
> > > git://repo.or.cz/qemu/ar7.git
> > > in small patches. Of course, the final goal is to have devices which
> > > work.
> > >
> > > To have a list of devices which should be supported helps other
> > > people who want
> > > to contribute to eepro100.c. They won't write code just for i82557c
> > > if the same
> > > code should be applied to i82557[ab] as well, for example.
> > >   
> > >       
> > You can do that with comments instead of exposing broken devices to an
> > end-user.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Anthony Liguori
> >
> >     
>
> 1. The new devices are not exposed to end-users, at least not for the
> moment.
>   

They are, or will be soon, thanks to qdev.

> 2. Many qemu devices are more or less "broken". This is quite normal for an
>     emulation, because developers of those emulations only have limited
>     documentation / resources / testing capabilities.
>   

Works in some circumstances and completely untested and expected to fail 
are two separate things.

> So a reasonable way might be to expose many devices to end-users, but
> to classify them as stable / testing / experimental (like it is done for the
> host and target support).
>   

Code that has no chance of working shouldn't be in the tree because it's 
untestable.  Untestable code will rot.  More to the point, what's the 
point of having untested code in the tree when the expectation is that 
it won't work at all?  Who does it benefit?

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> Regards
> Stefan Weil
>
>