Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/6] configure: Try to fix --static linking

["Alex Bennée" <alex.bennee@linaro.org>]

Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> writes:

> On Fri, 14 Jun 2019 at 08:27, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@redhat.com> wrote:
>> Apparently QEMU static linking is slowly bitroting. Obviously it
>> depends the libraries an user has installed, anyway it seems there
>> are not much testing done.
>
> The main reason for supporting static linking is so we can build
> the user-mode emulators. Almost always the problems with
> static linking the softmmu binaries and the tools are
> issues with the distro's packaging of the static libraries
> (pkg-config files which specify things that don't work for
> static is a common one).
>
> So we could put in a lot of checking of "is what pkg-config
> tells us broken". Or we could just say "we don't support static
> linking for anything except the usermode binaries". We
> should probably phase in deprecation of that because it's
> possible somebody's using it seriously, but it seems like
> a fairly weird thing to do to me.

It would be nice to have a --static-user config flag and deprecate the
--static flag. I don't think there is a decent use case for system
emulation targets.

The Gentoo ebuild currently jumps through hoops to build QEMU by doing
the build twice, first for softmmu targets and then for user targets. I
suspect all of that is mostly to handle the reasonable "static-user" use
case which is what people really want*.

*I'm guessing

--
Alex Bennée