From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:51883) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Zja25-0005zO-PQ for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Tue, 06 Oct 2015 17:44:26 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Zja22-0005lV-8G for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Tue, 06 Oct 2015 17:44:25 -0400 Received: from mail.uni-paderborn.de ([131.234.142.9]:33531) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ZjVfJ-0007OU-MO for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Tue, 06 Oct 2015 13:04:37 -0400 References: <1721DBB7-96BE-4066-BFE1-A0C6E91935BD@yahoo.com> From: Bastian Koppelmann Message-ID: <5613FF1F.70703@mail.uni-paderborn.de> Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2015 19:04:31 +0200 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <1721DBB7-96BE-4066-BFE1-A0C6E91935BD@yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] How to get started with the source code of Qemu? List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Aaron Elkins , qemu-devel@nongnu.org Hi Aaron, On 10/06/2015 04:17 PM, Aaron Elkins wrote: > Hi all, > > I am new to Qemu, and I’m extremely interested in understanding how the source code of Qemu work. But after > I downloaded the whole project, I just lost in it, the project is too large for me to get started. > > If anyone here can point me to some useful document or some guides, to make me get started in understanding > the source code? it depends of the area of your interest. Or do you seek a general overview regarding QEMU? When I started with QEMU, I picked some part that looked interesting, looked at an interesting sounding function, added a breakpoint in gdb, and slowly stepped through it in order to understand it. Looking at the backtrace helps to see where this function was called to find more interesting function for the breakpoint stepping. Sadly there is not a lot of documentation today. For some areas you have good chance, if you look into the docs/ directory. But mostly the sourcecode is the documentation. We talked about that issue on the QEMU Summit 2015 and would like to change it. However it depends on how people are willing to write high level documentation. If you are interested in the tcg-frontend part of QEMU, I can give you some hints. > > What knowledge are required to understand the source code? > > BTW, i know this project is not that simple to understand, but I would like to try, even I need to know a lot > of other knowledge before that, but at least let me get started. > > Thanks > > -Aaron > > Cheers, Bastian