Re: QEMU Automated Testing (was [Qemu-devel] qemu Makefile.target vl.h hw/acpi.c hw/adlib.c ...)

[Paul Brook <paul@codesourcery.com>]

> >As Qemu cannot use multicore CPUs (partially due to missing thread
> >safety), yet, you won't benefit from this unless you want to run
> >multiple instances of Qemu in parallel.
>
> how close is thread safey?

In a useful form: a fair way off.

It's relatively simple to hack something together than runs. Making it work 
correctly and go fast is much harder though. My current prototype (running on 
2 cores) runs about a quarter the speed of normal qemu, and dies shortly 
after booting because the guest atomic synchronisation primitives don't work 
right.

Either way, for a tinderbox or automated testing yo *do* have lots of 
different tests you can run in parallel, so it doesn't matter that each qemu 
instance only uses one core. We're only talking about small SMP here - maybe 
16 cores, but not thousands.

Paul