Re: [Qemu-devel] Fabrice Bellard 's QEMU configuration files

[Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>]

On Friday 10 October 2008 18:44:23 Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Back in June, Fabrice Bellard posted a patch against SVN 4734:
>
>      http://www.archivum.info/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/2008-06/msg00513.html
>
> to add configuration files to qemu.
>
> It seems that this work was never merged into SVN and that patchset
> does not apply to current SVN head.
>
> Does anyone have an updated version of that patch or something similar?
>
> Is there any interest in pushing this kind of functionality into
> qemu mainline?

I point out that device trees are becoming standard in the Linux kernel, and 
being spread from powerpc and sparc to arm, mips, and so on.  I attented a 
BOF about them at OLS, and there's even a mailing list for them now:

https://ozlabs.org/mailman/listinfo/devicetree-discuss

This means the Linux kernel already has data files which describe boards on 
architectures that don't have big defacto standard hardware layouts already 
implemented in C, and lots of 'em are yanking the C implementation in favor 
of using the device tree parser.

Teaching qemu to parse a device tree means you get a ton of free board layouts 
from the linux kernel.  (It also simplifies "-kernel" since lots of platforms 
need the flattened device tree passed in from the firmware...)

Somewhat out-of-date documentation is available here:

http://kernel.org/doc/Documentation/powerpc/booting-without-of.txt

You could ping the above list to see if there's something more recent...

Rob