Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 15/18] rtc: add a dynamic property for retrieving the date

[Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>]

  Hi,

> Now I understand that for dynamically created properties (like on your
> PCB) this is necessary and can't be avoided. For about 99% of the
> devices static definition of properties would be enough, though.
> 
> So basically what I'm asking for is getting the static structs back for
> the 99% and have common code that parses them and calls the appropriate
> functions to actually the properties. The remaining 1% that
> creates/deletes properties during runtime and isn't covered can directly
> call whatever it needs.

Fully agree.  I guess we can even generate those structs in many cases.
 We will parse the ${device}State structs anyway for visitor-based
vmstate, so with some extra declaration we can generate property
descriptions too.  For example this ...

static PCIDeviceInfo intel_hda_info = {
    .qdev.name    = "intel-hda",
    [ ... ]
    .qdev.props   = (Property[]) {
        DEFINE_PROP_UINT32("debug", IntelHDAState, debug, 0),
        DEFINE_PROP_UINT32("msi", IntelHDAState, msi, 1),
        DEFINE_PROP_END_OF_LIST(),
    }
};

... could be just ...

struct IntelHDAState {
    [ ... ]
    /* properties */
    uint32_t debug __property(0);
    uint32_t msi   __property(1);
};

cheers,
  Gerd