Re: [Qemu-devel] [Patch Submission] QEMU with GCC/Win32

["Steve D. Perkins" <lists@steveperkins.net>]

Paul Brook wrote:

>Are you sure you included the correct patch?
>
>I don't see anything win32 specific about this patch. AFAICS it's just the 
>gcc4 patch *that I wrote* and posed some time ago.
>Both cygwin and mingw is still using gcc3.4.x, so it shouldn't be necessary.
>
>  
>
Paul -

    Please don't think I'm trying to "plagiarize" or steal anyone else's 
credit.  I've been talking about this patch for some time, in posts to 
the QEMU forum at "http://qemu.dad-answers.com/" and in the "Applying 
windows source patch to CVS?" post to this mailing list on 7/27.  When I 
was trying to build QEMU 0.7.0, I found a patch at 
"http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/PortingTips-en.html" for the 0.6 
codebase... and I made a few modifications to it for 0.7.0.  Yesterday, 
I went through the same exercise to update it for QEMU 0.7.1.  I've 
changed some of the calls to the "error()" function in "dyngen.c", but 
otherwise the main patch content remains the same.

    I've been very up-front about the origins of the patch, and haven't 
tried to pass myself off as the original author.  However, the original 
author hasn't posted an updated patch since the 0.6 generation of QEMU, 
so you could say I've "adopted" and kept it maintained for the past two 
QEMU releases.  My INITIAL desire, before I started, was to contact the 
original patch author and ask him/her to update it... but the website 
listed above includes no names or contact information at all.  Believe 
me, I am NOT looking to be "The Official GCC/Win32 Guy" and continue 
maintaining this patch forever... my ideal wish is for the changes to go 
into the main codebase so future patching isn't necessary for anybody!

    I'm not sure what you mean about the patch "not being necessary".  I 
haven't tried building with Cygwin, so I can't speak for that platform.  
My build environment is MinGW with the MSYS shell (to avoid onerous 
licensing issues and DLL dependencies), and I can assure that the patch 
very much is necessary for the current release of QEMU with the current 
release of MinGW.  QEMU does compile fine on Win32 with GCC 3.4, but the 
executable crashes immediately when you try to run it.  By applying the 
patch I just posted, you get an executable that compiles and runs 
properly (I've been running a FreeBSD environment just fine with a build 
from the 0.7.1 patch I just posted). 

    I get the impression that QEMU is not really being tested on the 
Win32/GCC platform, so the team (is there a "team" or is it really just 
Fabrice?) may not be aware that support is still lacking for that 
platform.  Unfortunately, that is the case... but the patch I just 
posted corrects the issue, and that's why I'm encouraging its inclusion 
in the main codebase.

Steve