Re: Windows host support [was: Re: [Qemu-devel] CFP: 1st International QEMU Users Forum]

[Nathan Froyd <froydnj@codesourcery.com>]

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 08:34:28AM -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> On 11/28/2010 04:56 AM, Alexander Graf wrote:
>> On 28.11.2010, at 01:17, Nathan Froyd wrote:
>>> We (CodeSourcery) are very interested in Windows host support.  (We
>>> distribute QEMU with our commerical development products for
>>> ARM/PowerPC/MIPS/SH/ColdFire/x86.)  Unfortunately, we've mostly been
>>> backporting patches lately and haven't done a full merge from upstream
>>> in some time, so we haven't noticed any potential breakage.  If somebody
>>> wanted to point out to me what the (potential) Windows issues are, we
>>> could take a look.
>>>      
>> Redirecting you to Anthony here for the specifics. The main problem
>> is that we don't have anyone who takes the lead on Windows
>> support. _If_ something breaks of _if_ we need someone to take over
>> the windows specific parts, there's this huge gap.
>
> Uh, Windows system simulation has never worked reliably.  It doesn't  
> even have proper AIO support.
>
> If someone is building a product based on it, I'm amazed.

Well, technically we only support QEMU as a simple instruction set
simulator in our products, and the bits present work well enough for
that.  (It is of course possible those bits have been broken in the time
since our last upstream merge.)  If you want to venture into system
simulation and it breaks, then you get to keep both pieces.

It would, however, be better to eventually support full system
simulation, and making Windows hosts work right would be a necessary
precondition to that.

-Nathan