Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/5] qdev: add driver class support.

[Paul Brook <paul@codesourcery.com>]

On Thursday 09 July 2009, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> On 07/09/09 15:19, Paul Brook wrote:
> > On Thursday 09 July 2009, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> >>    Hi,
> >>
> >> This patch series brings driver classes to qdev.
> >
> > I'm not sure this is a good idea. You should be able to figure it out
> > from the device properties.
>
> I don't think this will work out in the general case.  Some devices have
> properties which can be used for that, i.e. network cards have a mac
> address (no attribute yet but I expect it will come some day).  Not
> every device class has specific properties you can use to identify them
> though.  How would you identify a sound card for example?

Ok, put it annother way: Why do you need to identify them? Why would libvirt 
care whether a device is (say) a sound card or a VGA adapter? In principle 
there's no reason why you shouldn't have many or none of both.

IMHO the only reason we have the current grouping is because it's forced on us 
by the various commandline options which mix host and machine configuration.

Paul