Re: [PATCH 00/47] single-binary: implement dynamic filtering for QOM types

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Fri, Sep 04, 2026 at 01:01:03PM +0200, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> writes:
> 
> > I was wondering if maybe one way to approach that is some
> > "disambiguation" syntax on the machine name; so one could write
> > "-machine aarch64:virt" vs "-machine riscv64:virt" (or whatever) to
> > disambiguate when just "-machine virt" would be ambiguous; but if
> > there's only one machine of that name then just "-machine foo" would
> > work. That extends nicely to truly heterogenous machine names:
> > "-machine my-mixed-machine" wouldn't need the user to explicitly
> > give it a -target option or otherwise say that it includes aarch64
> > and microblaze CPUs. (We'd probably need to put something in to
> > prevent future machine name clashes across targets, so that the
> > only clashes are our existing legacy ones.)
> 
> Do we need new syntax?
> 
> Rename the clashing machine types, keeping the old name as alias.  When
> getting a machine by name, require the name to be unambiguous.

This probably requires us to support more than 1 alias per machine.

Specifically with aarch64 we have:

  virt                 QEMU 11.2 ARM Virtual Machine (alias of virt-11.2)

so we need to rename "virt-11.2" but have already used its "alias"
feature for "virt", which would also need renaming

ie we would need

  arm-virt-11.2

with aliases

    virt-11.2
    arm-virt
    virt

So is it better to extend the alias feature, or have the new -machine
syntax ? 

With regards,
Daniel
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