[Qemu-devel] Interest in hardware plugin functionality

[Andre Pech <andre.pech@gmail.com>]

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Hi,

I have been using qemu to simulate various types of custom hardware for
testing purposes. Rather than having to recompile qemu every time I change a
hardware simulation, I instead patched qemu to support dynamically loading
hardware plugin files at run time. The basic idea is that you can specify
.so files to load on the command line when you boot qemu. These files will
be dlopened by qemu at run time, and will register themselves as hardware to
the appropriate hardware controller (ie a PCI device hardware plugin
registers itself with the PCI bus).

I was hoping to get people's reactions to / interest in this sort of
feature. Currently I have patched qemu to work for my own purposes, which
required having to hack around some issues I ran into. These hacks do not
require major changes in how qemu works, but are rather structural changes.
For example, the qemu header file naming structure does not lend itself to
being installed to somewhere like /usr/include/qemu, and would need some
changing. This includes changing 'include "config.h"' to include 'include
"qemu/config.h"' due to the common use of config.h by other packages, as
well as working through the issues of how to structure things for building
qemu hardware plugins against multiple architecture types.

I am more than willing to put all the effort into turning this into a nice
patch, if there is a maintainer interested in helping me shepherd this into
the mainline.

Thanks,
 Andre Pech

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