[Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH 4/5] New VMstate save/load infrastructure

[Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>]

   Hi,

>> Hmm, I'm not sure VMStateInfo is that useful here.  All the get/put
>> callbacks are simple two-liners, and it is unlikely that the number of
>> types ever grows.
>
> Thinking about this.  VMStateType is not needed at all (see that it is
> not used in the patch).  But Ilike the VMStateInfo struct approach.
> This is the easier way of dealing with structs.  For instance
> pci_device_save().  My idea was to just create a new VMStateInfo for it,
> and then everything that needs to call pci_device_save() just add a
> field like:
>
> VMSTATE_FILED(dev, ThisPCIDevice, verion_id, pci_vmstate_info, PCIDevice)

Hmm.  I had a completely different approach in mind:

In pci.c:

vmstatefield pci_state[] = {
    VMSTATE_FIELD(...),
    [ ... ]
    VMSTATE_FIELD_END_OF_LIST()
}

In a pci driver:

vmstatefield device_state[] = {
    VMSTATE_INCLUDE(&pci_state, ...),
    VMSTATE_FIELD(...),
    [ ... ]
    VMSTATE_FIELD_END_OF_LIST()
}

Advantage: you don't have to write new code for each struct you want to 
save away state information from.

> +static void vmstate_save(QEMUFile *f, VMStateDescription *vmsd, void *base)
> +{
> +    VMStateField *field = vmsd->fields;
> +    int i;
> +
> +    while(field->name) {
> +        for (i = 0; i<  field->num; i++) {
> +            field->info->put(f, field->info, base + field->offset +
> +                             field->info->size * i);
> +        }

The other way would be dropping info and have
"switch(field->type) { ... }" here.

You indeed don't need both info and type.

Properties need the additional type field for typechecking in 
qemu_prop_set_$type() which doesn't use the print()/parse() callbacks.

cheers,
   Gerd