Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/6] Device state visualization reloaded

[Jan Kiszka]

On 2011-09-06 16:48, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 04:48:10PM +0200, Jan Kiszka wrote:
>> More than one year ago I posted some patches to add a monitor command
>> callend device_show. The purpose of that command is to dump the state of
>> some qdev device based on its vmstate.
>>
>> To improve the usability of that interface, the previous series also
>> tried to create a canonical qdev tree path name format and even added
>> monitor command expansion. That format created quite a few discussions,
>> and we never came to some conclusion.
>>
>> As device_show is still a useful tool for debugging but qdev structuring
>> and addressing may significantly change in the near future, I decided to
>> reanimate those patches while avoiding almost any change of the
>> addressing scheme. The only one I propose is automatic ID assignment for
>> anonymous devices so that any qdev device is in principle addressable
>> (e.g. APIC and IO-APIC on x86).
>>
>> As back then, device_show remains HMP-only to avoid any stable ABI
>> issues around QMP.
> 
> I'm afraid that won't be enough to stop people
> scripting this command - libvirt accessed
> HMP for years.
> 
> On the other hand, no QMP command means e.g.
> libvirt users don't get any benefit from this.
> 
> What I think will solve these problems, for both HMP and QMP,
> is an explicit 'debug_unstable' or 'debug_unsupported' command that will
> expose all kind of debugging functionality making it
> very explicit that it's an unsupported debugging utility.
> 
> Proposed syntax:
> 
> debug_unstable <subcommand> <options>
> 
> Example:
> 
> debug_unstable device_show -all

For HMP, this would needlessly complicate the user interface, nothing I
would support. People scripting things on top of HMP are generally doing
this on their own risk and cannot expect output stability.

device_show is like info qtree: the output will naturally change as the
emulated hardware evolves, information is added/removed, or we simply
improve the layout. Recent changes on info network are an example for
the latter.

Jan

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