[Qemu-devel] Help on effort estimation

[Patrizio Boschi <patrizio.boschi@gmail.com>]

Hi, I'm doing some academical research about the development of device
emulators. So far I managed to create an emulator of a simple PCI
device (Intel i6300ESB watchdog timer) just to get an idea of the
development process in QEMU, and studied some of the other emulators
in qemu/hw. I was also looking for some basic metrics (e.g. sloc,
emulator sloc/driver sloc, function points) and models (e.g. cocomo
II) to do some effort estimation (e.g. how many person-month to
emulate a particular device model?).

At this point, a little help from you would really benefit my studies
and research. So... the questions are very simple :)
- does someone have old or future development schedules for some of
the qemu modules to share?
- could someone (roughly) estimate the work-days needed to develop the
emulator of a very simplce device (e.g. an hardware timer), an hard
one (e.g. a VMEbus bridge with poor documentation), a mid one (e.g. an
ethernet card), given an experienced programmer?
- could someone (roughly)  estimate which are the prerequisites to
successfully develop a particular device emulator? (e.g. datasheet,
real hardware, driver source code, vendor help, luck, girls, ...)
- that's all but you can give hints if you want :)

I'll obviously share all of my work once is finished.

Thank you in advance,
Patrizio