Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v4 3/4] hw/arm: add sunxi machine type

[Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>]

On 29 November 2013 08:56, Li Guang <lig.fnst@cn.fujitsu.com> wrote:
> why not just say this SoC is a board?
> and other board like cubieboard are only
> this SoC + several devices,
> I think is reasonable, at least in this case.

Because it's not in general how we prefer to model
things in QEMU. When something goes into upstream
it means we then have to maintain it and keeping things
consistent with everything else is an important part of that.

> A10 and A13 both have a cortex-a8, different in HDMI and SATA,
> suppose we modeled A10, A10State,
> if we add cubieboard, we realize A10,
> then we have a board called demoboard based on A13,
> what we will do here?
> also realize A10?  unlucky, we miss HDMI and SATA difference,
> model A13? new a A13State?
> but we have most devices the same for A10 & A13.

Yes, in that case you'd have board models for cubieboard
and demoboard, SoC models for A10 and A13, and
device models for all the components of A10 and A13.
That seems an entirely straightforward approach. If
A10 and A13 hardware share the same devices mostly
then the QEMU models of them would also share the
same device models: the top level SoC model generally
just creates a bunch of device models and wires them up.

>> Is "sunxi" what the hardware is actually called, or only
>> what the kernel port has been called? More information
>> about where this name comes from might make it easier
>> to tell if it is the correct one for the QEMU SoC models.

> I tried to contact Allwinner's engineer,
> no response until now.

Well, at the moment I have no idea if "sunxi" is
a name that comes from within Allwinner or if it's
just some codename you guys have picked.

-- PMM