[Qemu-devel] Re: Unmaintained QEMU builds

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

On 08/17/2010 09:56 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>> If Paolo's Win32 threads get merged, would there be other reasons
>> against continuing Win32 support?
>
> I think a better question would be, should we even bother with thread
> wrappers? If we drop win32 support, we can just assume pthreads and
> avoid a layer of indirection.

Yes, we would.  qemu_thread_create ensures the newly-created thread 
won't receive any signals, for example.

Some day the wrappers could even start using futexes directly if there 
were a reason to do so.

> I disagree. There are quite a lot more patches and features written for
> these systems than Win32. With the exception of Darwin, at least the
> other Unices are close enough to Linux that the work to support them is
> relatively small.

Darwin is as close to Linux as FreeBSD is (and very close to FreeBSD, in 
turn).

> Considering that we're well over half a million lines of code today, I
> think we would do ourselves a favor by dropping some of the dead
> features we're carrying.

I agree, for example savevm/loadvm support for embedded boards is likely 
one of these features.  Right now I see no reason to declare Win32 a 
failure, though this may change in the future.

Paolo