This functionality is not strictly for hotplugging. Maybe my use of the term hardware plugin was misleading. The patch adds the ability to pass a .so file compiled against qemu's header files to qemu on the command line. This .so file is dlopened and registers itself as hardware appropriately, all before the operating system actually boots.
I could envision adding the ability to have a qemu monitor command to similarly open such a file in order to hotplug a hardware device, but obviously this would be limited to the hardware types that the operating system supports hotplugging for.
Andre

On 1/10/06, Lennert Buytenhek <buytenh@wantstofly.org> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 09, 2006 at 05:38:58PM -0800, Andre Pech wrote:

> 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 think the biggest problem would be that a lot of operating systems
don't support hotplug PCI.


--L


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