Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH for-1.5 0/3] hw/pci-host/versatile: Fix issues with newer kernels

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

On 16 May 2013 17:58, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> wrote:
> FWIW, I plan to really get this done in the kernel for 3.11 properly
> and rework the entire versatile and realview code base to work without
> any platform specific code in arch/arm. The plan is to use the new
> infrastructure for PCI and put that code into drivers/pci/host,
> and have it scan the hardware using DT only. We can have a backwards
> compatibility setup for versatile-pb without DT, but in the long
> run, I would prefer to kill off that boot option.

That sounds cool.

> I remember there was a way to autogenerate the dtb blob in qemu at
> some point, based on the devices enabled in the model. Did that ever
> make it in?

Nope, and it never will, except for the extremely limited case
of mach-virt plus some basic stuff like virtio devices. For
ARM you absolutely must pass in the device tree blob that
came with the kernel version you're booting or it's all liable
to crash horribly, fail to find devices or otherwise misbehave,
so the only reliable thing for QEMU to do is make minimal
modifications to the dtb the user gives us.
[Extended version of this rant here:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2013-05/msg01877.html ]

thanks
-- PMM