[PATCH 0/9] new plugin argument passing scheme

[Mahmoud Mandour <ma.mandourr@gmail.com>]

Hello,

This series removes passing arguments to plugins through "arg=" since
it's redundant and reduces readability especially when the argument
itself is composed of a name and a value.

Also, passing arguments through "arg=" still works but is marked as
deprecated and will produce a deprecation warning.

Right now, the code for parsing the argument before passing it to the
plugin is unfortunately not so clean but that's mainly because "arg=" is
still supported.

At first, considering boolean parameters, those were not special to
plugins and QEMU did not complain about passing them in the form
"arg=bool_arg" even though that's considered a short-form boolean, which
is deprecated. As "arg" is removed, a deprecation warning is issued.

This is mitigated by making plugins aware of boolean arguments and
parses them through a newly exposed API, namely the `qapi_bool_parse`
function through a plugin API function. Now plugins expect boolean
parameters to be passed in the form that other parts of QEMU expect,
i.e. "bool_arg=[on|true|yes|off|false|no]".

Since we're still supporting "arg=arg_name", there are some assumptions
that I made that I think are suitable:

    1. "arg=arg_name" will be passed to the plugin as "arg_name=on".
    2. "arg=on" and "arg" will not be assumed to be the old way of
        passing args. Instead, it will assume that the argument name is
        "arg" and it's a boolean parameter. (will be passed to plugin
        as "arg=on")

The docs are updated accordingly and a deprecation notice is put in the
deprecated.rst file.

Mahmoud Mandour (9):
  plugins: allow plugin arguments to be passed directly
  plugins/api: added a boolean parsing plugin api
  plugins/hotpages: introduce sortby arg and parsed bool args correctly
  plugins/hotblocks: Added correct boolean argument parsing
  plugins/lockstep: make socket path not positional & parse bool arg
  plugins/hwprofile: adapt to the new plugin arguments scheme
  plugins/howvec: Adapting to the new argument passing scheme.
  docs/tcg-plugins: new passing parameters scheme for cache docs
  docs/deprecated: deprecate passing plugin args through `arg=`

 contrib/plugins/hotblocks.c | 14 +++++++++++--
 contrib/plugins/hotpages.c  | 30 ++++++++++++++++++----------
 contrib/plugins/howvec.c    | 24 +++++++++++++++--------
 contrib/plugins/hwprofile.c | 39 +++++++++++++++++++++++++------------
 contrib/plugins/lockstep.c  | 31 ++++++++++++++++++++---------
 docs/devel/tcg-plugins.rst  | 38 ++++++++++++++++++------------------
 docs/system/deprecated.rst  |  6 ++++++
 include/qemu/qemu-plugin.h  | 13 +++++++++++++
 linux-user/main.c           |  2 +-
 plugins/api.c               |  5 +++++
 plugins/loader.c            | 24 +++++++++++++++++++----
 qemu-options.hx             |  9 ++++-----
 12 files changed, 165 insertions(+), 70 deletions(-)

-- 
2.25.1