Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH for-2.12] hw/riscv: Fix crashes with "-nodefaults"

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 23/03/2018 14:12, Peter Maydell wrote:
> I think that the latter seems to be what the design intends:
> a backend with a NULL chardev pointer is "backend with no
> chardev attached at the moment". At least some of our UART devices
> handle that as "just dump output into nothingness", which
> seems logical to me.
> 
> Cc'ing Marc-André and Paolo as the chardev maintainers --
> do you have a plan for what the intended design here is?

-nodefaults was added for x86 and other machines whose devices are
discoverable through PCI enumeration, ACPI or something like that, and
on those machine it suppresses the default devices.  For machines that
create their device tree automatically, it makes sense to do the same.

However, if the machine is emulating a real-world board with a fixed SoC
and fixed hardware in the SoC, it makes more sense to create a null backend.

Paolo