Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH] Allow building without graphics support

[Scott Wood <scottwood@freescale.com>]

On 12/12/2012 01:52:29 AM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> On 12/12/12 04:18, Scott Wood wrote:
> > QEMU is sometimes used in embedded contexts, where graphical support
> > is unnecessary.  The ability to turn off graphics support not only
> > saves some space, but it eliminates the dependency on pixman.
> 
> We have tons of hand-crafted pixel shuffeling code all over the place
> which I want replace with pixman library calls.  It's a long road and
> will take quite some time.
> 
> I wanna have pixman as core service in qemu for that, not some  
> optional
> add-on.

Why?  Isn't modularity a good thing?  It can still be a core service  
for any part of QEMU that deals with graphics.

> > My immediate motivation was that the QEMU-supplied pixman was being  
> a
> > pain to cross compile (especially without hacking up the generated  
> QEMU
> > makefiles to pass additional things to pixman's configure),
> 
> We pass on cross-prefix to pixman's configure, so it should
> JustWork[tm].

That's actually what was breaking it (I gave more details in another  
e-mail in this thread).  cross-prefix and host tuple are not quite the  
same thing.

> > and in
> > general it would be nice to not have to carry around graphical  
> baggage
> > when running on hardware that doesn't even have a display (so I was  
> more
> > inclined to do this than to spend effort fixing the pixman build).
> 
> I run qemu on headless machines alot, then connect via vnc/spice ...

So then don't turn off graphics support in your build, just as you  
don't turn off vnc/spice. :-P

Another thing that is missing on the hardware I'm talking about is a  
hard drive, so overly large qemu binaries are also not fun.

-Scott