Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH][RFC] Split non-TCG bits out of exec.c

[Fabrice Bellard <fabrice@bellard.org>]

Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Unlike kqemu, KVM does not use TCG at all when accelerating QEMU.  Having TCG
> present is not a problem when using KVM on x86.  x86 already has TCG host and
> target support and it's quite convenient to be able to disable/enable KVM and
> compare it to TCG when debugging.
> 
> KVM also supports architectures that do not have TCG host and target support
> such as ia64, s390, and PPC[1].  For these architectures, TCG is an inhibitor
> for upstream inclusion.
> 
> TCG is pretty well isolated in QEMU so building these targets without TCG
> should be easy enough.  This breaks down in exec.c though.  There is a lot of
> TCG specific code in exec.c, but also a lot of code that KVM needs.
> 
> This patch moves the non-TCG specific bits of exec.c into a separate file,
> exec-all.c.  This makes it relatively easy to build QEMU without TCG support.
> More patches will come to complete this work but the exec.c bits are probably
> 95% of what is needed.
> 
> The remaining bits are some general cleanups where layering has been violated
> and the introduction of a new -kvm subtarget, similar to -softmmu or
>  -linux-user.  This target will not have TCG support and only support KVM.
> However, before going down that path, I wanted to see if anyone objected to this
> bit of the cleanup.
> 
> Any objections?

I suggest to go even further: there should be a way in QEMU to define
CPUs which do not rely on the dynamic translator and this choice should
be doable at runtime (i.e. not with a bunch of #ifdefs as you may do
it). This way you could not only plug KVM CPUs without having the
equivalent TCG one, but also CPUs from other sources (i.e. the x86
interpreter of malc, or the cycle accurate PTLsim x86 emulator).

Fabrice.