Re: [Qemu-devel] Using ISA-PNP for resource management

[Fabrice Bellard <fabrice@bellard.org>]

Matthew Mastracci wrote:
> I was looking at how much work it would take to switch to using ISA-PNP
> for resource management.  I believe that it might simplify some of the
> QEMU internals, as well as make things like having multiple
> network/other devices much easier.  It may make moving to PCI (or having
> an option to boot with either ISAPNP or PCI on the fly) much easier.
> 
> For anyone interested, the ISAPNP spec page is at:
> 
>  http://osdev.neopages.net/docs/PNP-ISA-v1.0a.pdf?the_id=54
> 
> I believe the best way to implement ISA-PNP would be for each device to
> register an ISA-PNP context, then add specific resource requirements to
> the context as necessary.  The ISAPNP manager would then interact with
> the operating system and call the isapnp_configure method whenever the
> OS changes the setup.
> 
> Perhaps something like this.  I would imagine that the ISAPNP resource
> manager would clear the IO port range back to the default IO port
> manager before calling the *_isapnp_configure routine:

OK for ISAPNP, but it should just indicate what is the hardcoded 
configuration. I don't want to use it to set the exact ioports and irqs. 
Moreover PCI is about to be integrated in QEMU, so it may not be worth 
the effort.

Fabrice.