Re: [Qemu-devel] Modular qemu?

[Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>]

Thiemo Seufer wrote:
>> What about non-plugin dlopen()?  Right now building qemu (with all  
>> options enabled) requires a large amount of libraries, hence a lot of  
>> dependencies.  For example, a server setup that will only be used with  
>> -vnc needs to have SDL installed.  This will only get worse with opengl  
>> support.
>>
>> I'm thinking of something similar to linux kernel modules: no backward  
>> compatible ABI, simply load-on-demand functionality that can be packaged  
>> separately to reduce dependencies.  With kvm integrated, we could even  
>> make the cpu emulator an optional loadable module.
>>     
>
> What problem would this solve?
>
>   

You build qemu once, but with separate sub-packages:

  qemu
  qemu-sdl
  qemu-vnc
  qemu-tcg
  qemu-kvm

On a desktop deployment, you install qemu, qemu-kvm, qemu-tcg, and 
qemu-sdl (which pulls a bunch of dependencies).  On a server deployment, 
you install qemu, qemu-vnc, and qemu-kvm (which avoids dependencies and 
the tcg code which is not useful on a server).  This allows a 
distribution to only maintain and support one qemu binary for different 
deployment scenarios.

We might even make the various targets loadable modules, so you have a 
single binary which supports a bunch of targets.  This is more difficult 
due to the large numbers of #defines, but is doable.

-- 
I have a truly marvellous patch that fixes the bug which this
signature is too narrow to contain.