[Qemu-devel] (Before) RFC for new features

[Hetz Ben Hamo <hetz@witch.dyndns.org>]

Fabrice Bellard wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As porting the SDL version to other OSes than Linux seems to become an 
> important issue, I plan to add the following features in the next days:

I would like to raise an issue which I'm not sure if it was looked closely..

Lets see what do we have today:

* 3 Busses (ISA, ISA PnP, PCI)
* 4 Processors (Pentium Pro, Arm, PPC, Sparc)
* 4 Network cards (NE2000 ISA, AMD PCNet, NE2000 PCI, 3COM PnP ISA)
* 2 Graphics cards (VESA, Cirrus Logic)
* 2 Bioses (PPC BIOS, Generic Bochs/QEMU BIOS)
* 2 hard drive formats (RAW, COW)

And I'm sure I have forgotten few things, not mentioning QEMU is not 
that publicallyy published (wait for Slashdot effect)..

I think that something needed here: A plugin mechanism.

What I was thinking that QEMU missing is a way that upon running QEMU 
(either first time or doing a first scan), it should "scan" for new 
hardware and register them as plugins (with depenedencies, so you cannot 
use PPC BIOS with Pentium Pro processor ;) ). That way a new plugin 
(either open or closed source) can register itself and a user can simply 
use it without having to configure everything..

The method I was thinking was something like Xine player uses when 
initializing the player..

Fabrice, others, what do you think about it?

Thanks,
Hetz