Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2] qom: Introduce object_realize_nofail()

[Peter Maydell]

On 12 April 2012 17:02, Anthony Liguori <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 04/12/2012 10:52 AM, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> Why would you design an infrastructure that lets you coherently bundle
>> together a collection of devices and have configurable properties on
>> that bundle as well as on the devices, and then *not* use it for machines?
>
>
> The machine concept in QEMU is "broken" IMHO.  If we want to maintain
> compatibility (and we do), we need to let machines act as a bridge.
>
> Here's how I expect the PC to work:
>
> qemu --no-machine -readconfig my-system.cfg
>
> [device "root"]
> driver=i440fx
> cpu[0]=cpu0
> slot[3]=e1000
> memory=2G
> biosname=bios.bin
>
> [device "cpu0"]
> driver=qemu64
>
> [device "e1000"]
> bus=/i440fx
> netdev=eth0
>
> [netdev "eth0"]
> type=tap

Isn't this just defining a machine in a config file without
naming it?

> There is no real need to have a '-machine' option and no need to model a
> machine.

This doesn't make sense to me. We need a -machine option because it's
the major way for the user to say what kind of model they want. We need
to model machines because without that we just have a pile of useless
devices.

> -M pc ends up being a compatibility bridge which takes a bunch of options
> that really do lots of different things (like choosing network device
> models).  I see machines as a function that takes a QemuOpts and then does
> the equivalent of the above.

-- PMM