From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1M3YfZ-0005pW-8h for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 11 May 2009 12:48:01 -0400 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1M3YfU-0005p2-SS for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 11 May 2009 12:48:00 -0400 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (port=51798 helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1M3YfU-0005oz-Nr for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 11 May 2009 12:47:56 -0400 Received: from mx2.redhat.com ([66.187.237.31]:33072) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1M3YfU-00050a-8B for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Mon, 11 May 2009 12:47:56 -0400 Message-ID: <4A085621.1040907@redhat.com> Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 19:45:21 +0300 From: Avi Kivity 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> <4A084DDC.1050506@us.ibm.com> In-Reply-To: <4A084DDC.1050506@us.ibm.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: Anthony Liguori Cc: Paul Brook , qemu-devel@nongnu.org Anthony Liguori wrote: > 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. We could enable that only on platforms that support it. > 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. No doubt. But taking the first step may encourage people to work towards it. > > 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). That's fine, I think. Not ideal but livable. -- Do not meddle in the internals of kernels, for they are subtle and quick to panic.