Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 00/14] qdev: assign unique names to all devices (part 1)

[Anthony Liguori]

On 09/16/2011 12:11 PM, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> Am 16.09.2011 18:54, schrieb Anthony Liguori:
> > This series just asks the device model developer to come up with a unique *when*
> > they're doing device composition.  Even with a totally path based interface,
> > this is always going to be a firm requirement.
> >
> > I think it may be possible to eliminate required device names by having a formal
> > notion of composition and have the devices store the names of the composed
> > devices as part of the reference to that device.  You could then have user
> > created devices use a separate hash table to track the names of those devices.
> >
> > But, we can't easily do this today.  Having either a fully qualified name or a
> > composition name as part of qdev_create() is the Right Thing IMHO so I think
> > this is the stepping stone to something more sophisticated.
>
> Actually, as I said, I think this naming scheme is already by far too
> sophisticated. Jan is completely right, there is no point in duplicating
> paths in a name. Either we assign names only if the user specified one,
> or we auto-generate a really simple name that doesn't resemble a path,
> can be easily typed and is actually useful to have in addition to paths
> (my "#foo-1" suggestion).

Names have to be relatively stable.  Instantiation ordering should not affect 
names nor should hotplug.  Otherwise two device models will end up with devices 
with different names.

Jan's point is that there is a stable path that could be used for the name and 
satisfy these purposes.  This is the composition path.  Either a device is 
created by the user (and therefore has a stable name and sits on the '/' part of 
the path) or is created through composition and has a derived named from a user 
created device.  Since the composed device is tied to its parent's lifecycle, 
the path is always valid.

So this is a simplification that I plan on running with.  For now, I think this 
series is the right next step because it gives us a path name for the name 
(although different syntax) and let's us enforce that all devices has a 
canonical path.

Independent of that, Jan suggested that we could have what's essentially an 
alias.  This is just a short name (could be in the form '%s-%d' % 
(class.lower(), object_count).  This alias is just a hash table.  It has nothing 
to do with the core device model.

I think what you're really getting at is that you want to be able to do 
something like 'ide0-hd0' to refer to a device via the command line or HMP.

I don't really disagree with that either.  But that's a layer on top of the core 
device model.  We shouldn't push every UI feature we want into the core device 
model.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori
> Kevin