Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2] qdev: Mark devices as non-hotpluggable by default

[Eduardo Habkost]

On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 04:26:44PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On 25 September 2017 at 16:19, Thomas Huth <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Not sure whether this works for the virtio-xxx-device devices,
> > though, since they are marked as user_creatable = true currently...
> 
> That's deliberate -- for the arm boards with virtio-mmio
> the board creates a bunch of virtio-mmio transports and the
> virtio-foo-device can be user created to plug into those.

Do they support device_add virtio-xxx-device, though?  If they
don't, should we report it as hotpluggable on a future QMP
query-device-type command?

> 
> If overall trying to do the 'right thing' is tricky here
> then perhaps we can start by flipping the default to
> not-hotpluggable and marking some devices hotpluggable
> that in theory shouldn't be with a comment about why.

Finding the full list of those devices is the tricky part.

> 
> Incidentally I think there's still some advantage in the
> "created as part of some other device" devices having
> to be explicitly marked hotpluggable, because those
> devices do still need some specific code in them to
> handle it (ie code to release the resources that are
> created in the device's realize method).

I agree this is still useful.

I was trying represent something different: I was looking for a
flag meaning "supports device_add", while the current meaning is
"supports late instantiation".

On all devices, device_add support requires late instantiation.
On most user-creatable devices, late instantiation support
implies device_add support (virtio-*-device is the only
exception).

This confusion can be solved by documenting
DeviceClass::hotpluggable as "may support device_add, as long as
the machine and bus lets you do it", so there's no harm in
setting it to true on virtio-*-device.

This won't allow us to automatically tell if a device can be
safely instantiated without a hotplug controller, though.

-- 
Eduardo