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Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:12:52 +0200
From: Fabrice Bellard <fabrice@bellard.org>
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Subject: [Qemu-devel] QEMU configuration files
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To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org

Hi,

My snapshot of the "object based" QEMU configuration system can be found 
at http://bellard.org/qemu/patches . I only tried it for x86 targets. It 
is not yet in committable state and comments are welcome !

General ideas:

- User preferences and machine definitions are separated. User 
preferences are in ~/.qemu/config for Unix systems. Machine definitions 
can override user preferences but I believe it should be the exception.

- Command line options override the user preferences and machine 
definitions.

- Machine definitions contain machine parameters and device definitions. 
Device definitions are used to create new devices not instanciated in 
the hardcoded machine definition such as PCI and USB devices.

There are many details which need clarification, in particular:

- PCI, IDE, SCSI and buses naming. It is important if we want to be able 
to dynamically instantiate complicated bus topologies.
- USB port naming
- Is it worth specifying board specific network controllers as separate 
devices (I tried to do that for smc91c111 devices) ? A simpler solution 
would be to add new machine parameters to do that.
- It would be logical to define QEMUDevice for every instanciated device 
and that register_savevm() use QEMUDevice as parameter, but it requires 
more changes in the code.
- Is it worth handling class defaults parameters ? I find the current 
implementation too complicated.

Fabrice.