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

[John Spencer <maillist-qemu@barfooze.de>]

On 12/12/2012 04:18 AM, 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.
>
> Signed-off-by: Scott Wood<scottwood@freescale.com>
> ---
> There are undoubtedly some rough edges that need to be cleaned up and
> other parts of graphics code that could be compiled out -- this is mainly
> meant to see what people think of the concept.
>
> 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), 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).
> ---

very nice, i hope this one makes it upstream.
it's always good to minimize external dependencies, or make them 
optional when they're unneeded in some cases.
i can imagine that qemu terminal mode is often sufficient, for example
when using rob landley's pre-built aboriginal linux system images.