Re: [Qemu-devel] Unified device model

["Einar Larsson" <larsson.einar@gmail.com>]

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I think that a device model with support for devices in shared libraries
combined with dynamic definition of the simulated HW would be great to be
able to support a large number of HW variants in QEmu.

I have developed several full system simulators for large embedded systems,
and we have always ended up with a systems with a very small component
runtime combined with a script based description of the system to simulate.
All parts of the system except the component loading and instantiation was
implemented as dynamically loaded components. I have worked on
implementations that use a pure C based component model as well as systems
that supports both C and C++ bindings for interface implementation.

I have not been able to find any information about the proposed Bochs
component model. Stanislav: where can I find any information about the Bochs
plugin architecture that you talk about?

Among the open source component frameworks i guess that XPCOM used in the
Mozilla products is one of the most interesting. It currently support C++,
Python and Java bindings but it can easily support C as well.

/Einar


I strongly support the idea of being able to use shared objects to be
> able to have a more dynamic device model; I can work on moving some of
> the drivers over to whatever new model that you figure out.
>
> It'd be nice too to have a dynamic board definition.  For instance,
> being able to describe in a configuration file a board with some odd
> configuration (eg. 10 serial port, no IDE controller) without
> recompiling would be helpful.  I'm not sure what kind of file format's
> appropriate.
>
> The number of supported devices on QEMU is going to explode... Having a
> good scalable architecture is going to be very useful.
>
> - Alex
>
>

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