From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1M3Y4z-0002dT-VO for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 11 May 2009 12:10:14 -0400 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1M3Y4v-0002d1-1C for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 11 May 2009 12:10:13 -0400 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (port=42005 helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1M3Y4u-0002cy-RS for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 11 May 2009 12:10:08 -0400 Received: from e4.ny.us.ibm.com ([32.97.182.144]:44889) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS-1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1M3Y4u-0005Ex-Bx for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 11 May 2009 12:10:08 -0400 Received: from d01relay04.pok.ibm.com (d01relay04.pok.ibm.com [9.56.227.236]) by e4.ny.us.ibm.com (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id n4BG5vRp015888 for ; Mon, 11 May 2009 12:05:57 -0400 Received: from d01av01.pok.ibm.com (d01av01.pok.ibm.com [9.56.224.215]) by d01relay04.pok.ibm.com (8.13.8/8.13.8/NCO v9.2) with ESMTP id n4BGA7rl154458 for ; Mon, 11 May 2009 12:10:07 -0400 Received: from d01av01.pok.ibm.com (loopback [127.0.0.1]) by d01av01.pok.ibm.com (8.12.11.20060308/8.13.3) with ESMTP id n4BGA6Q0008697 for ; Mon, 11 May 2009 12:10:07 -0400 Message-ID: <4A084DDC.1050506@us.ibm.com> Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 11:10:04 -0500 From: Anthony Liguori MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH 0/4][RFC] Add module infrastructure toQEMU References: <1242052009-27339-1-git-send-email-aliguori@us.ibm.com> <200905111548.48216.paul@codesourcery.com> <4A0841F7.7000201@redhat.com> In-Reply-To: <4A0841F7.7000201@redhat.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit List-Id: qemu-devel.nongnu.org List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Avi Kivity Cc: Paul Brook , qemu-devel@nongnu.org Avi Kivity wrote: >> There's also the issue that shared libraries imply it's OK for third >> parties to ship binary plugins. >> > > Can't we add wording to LICENSE to address this? I'd really like to > allow GPL plugins. Linux and now gcc allow this. There's a lot of technical work to actually support shared libraries on all the platforms QEMU supports. Even if we had that, and I expect a big flame war wrt reinventing autoconf here too, in order to realistically talk about plugins, we would need a much more modular infrastructure than we have today to allow a config file to specify a particular device without any core knowledge in QEMU of that device. It's an admirable goal but we're far away from that. When we eventually get there, we still have the issue of stable ABI (and Linux has this too). So, I don't think this is a debate that we need to have now. There's plenty of work to do before we get there :-) -- Regards, Anthony Liguori