Re: [Qemu-devel] regarding codebase

[Eric Blake]

On 02/03/2017 09:24 AM, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 03, 2017 at 02:28:49AM +0530, Shubham Kumar wrote:
>> I'm having difficulty in understanding the codebase of QEMU .There seem to 
>> have hundreds of code files and header files in the directory and I'm unable 
>> to figure out the functionality of each file.Is there any way to understand 
>> the function of each file ??
> 
> vl.c is the main() function for the qemu-system-* family of programs
> (the "system emulators").  You could start exploring the source code
> from there.  That's what I did when I first started hacking on QEMU.
> 
> Be prepared to read code.  QEMU isn't an educational codebase and the
> code reflects the requirements of many contributors over the years.
> Most of their requirements may not be relevant to you.  You will learn
> to skip the stuff that doesn't affect you and to see the big picture.

In fact, I seriously doubt ANYONE knows the entire code base.  Rather,
various people are experts in a subset of the code base; the MAINTAINERS
file is a good mapping of where to direct questions about a particular
file.  It's also a good jumping off point if you see a category that
interests you for knowing what files to inspect related to that category.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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