Re: [Qemu-devel] Interest in hardware plugin functionality

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>]

Can you post the patch somewhere?

I've looked into this myself in the past and some devices are more 
easily abstracted than others because of some strange dependencies.  I'm 
curious to see what devices you've turned into plugins and how you've 
solved these problems (I assume that you would make all the current 
devices plugins and not just allow for custom device plugins).

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

Andre Pech wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have been using qemu to simulate various types of custom hardware 
> for testing purposes. Rather than having to recompile qemu every time 
> I change a hardware simulation, I instead patched qemu to support 
> dynamically loading hardware plugin files at run time. The basic idea 
> is that you can specify .so files to load on the command line when you 
> boot qemu. These files will be dlopened by qemu at run time, and will 
> register themselves as hardware to the appropriate hardware controller 
> (ie a PCI device hardware plugin registers itself with the PCI bus).
>
> I was hoping to get people's reactions to / interest in this sort of 
> feature. Currently I have patched qemu to work for my own purposes, 
> which required having to hack around some issues I ran into. These 
> hacks do not require major changes in how qemu works, but are rather 
> structural changes. For example, the qemu header file naming structure 
> does not lend itself to being installed to somewhere like 
> /usr/include/qemu, and would need some changing. This includes 
> changing 'include "config.h"' to include 'include "qemu/config.h"' due 
> to the common use of config.h by other packages, as well as working 
> through the issues of how to structure things for building qemu 
> hardware plugins against multiple architecture types.
>
> I am more than willing to put all the effort into turning this into a 
> nice patch, if there is a maintainer interested in helping me shepherd 
> this into the mainline.
>
> Thanks,
> Andre Pech
>
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