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From: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
References: <cover.1489494746.git.janne.huttunen@nokia.com>
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Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2017 06:42:12 +0100
In-Reply-To: <33ee8842-e57d-c637-ae26-e4b89a7c1002@redhat.com> (Eric Blake's
	message of "Tue, 21 Mar 2017 12:48:58 -0500")
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Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC][PATCH 0/6] "bootonceindex" property
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To: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Cc: Janne Huttunen <janne.huttunen@nokia.com>, Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>, qemu-devel@nongnu.org

Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com> writes:

> On 03/16/2017 04:46 AM, Janne Huttunen wrote:
>> On Wed, 2017-03-15 at 08:24 +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The short answer: emulating real hardware.
>>>
>>> Ok, that is reason enough.
>>>
>>> Adding bootonceindex everywhere doesn't look like the best plan to me
>>> though.  Possibly we can pimp up bootindex in a backward-compatible
>>> way?
>>> Something like bootindex=<normal>[.<once>] ?
>> 
>> That would (likely) avoid modifying all devices, but wouldn't
>> that make the 'bootindex' property a string (now: 'int32')
>> and thus change the QOM API?
>
> Is there any way to make use of an alternate that supports both int and
> string simultaneously?  But see also Markus' recent addendum on the
> difficulties of supporting multiple types on command-line vs. through QMP:
>
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2017-03/msg04125.html

Making it a string that encodes two integers would be inappropriate for
QMP.  If you need two integers, QMP wants you to put two integers in
JSON.  That means either a new member next to bootindex, or turning
bootindex into an alternate of integer and object.

Not passing judgement on whether we actually need "once".