Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 00/14] qdev: assign unique names to all devices (part 1)

[Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>]

On 2011-09-16 18:00, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> This series introduces an infrastructure to remove anonymous devices from qdev.
> Anonymous devices are one of the big gaps between qdev and QOM so removing is
> a prerequisite to incrementally merging QOM.
> 
> Besides the infrastructure, I also converted almost all of the possible PC
> devices to have unique names.  Please not that naming is not a property of
> devices but rather of the thing that creates the devices (usually machines).
> 
> The names are ugly but this is because of the alternating device/bus hierarchy
> in qdev.  For now, the names use '::' as deliminators but I think Jan has
> convinced me that down the road, we should use '/' as a deliminator such that
> the resulting names are actually valid paths (using a canonical path format).

I still don't see why we need to store strings as device references.
Everyone that lacks a reference (QEMU-external users) can pass in a path
- which can be a device name in the simple case. That path is resolved
to an object reference before proceeding with the requested service. If
an object should be serialized in whatever way and we need a stable
name, a central service could return this by walking up the composition
tree until a user-assigned name is found.

So there is really no need to bother device model developers with the
topics "How do I define a unique name?" or "Do I need an index or will
there be never more than one foo device?".

Jan

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