Re: [PATCH 2/2] hw/arm/palm.c: Encapsulate misc GPIO handling in a device

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

On Mon, 13 Jul 2020 at 11:21, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <f4bug@amsat.org> wrote:
>
> On 7/13/20 12:05 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > On Mon, 13 Jul 2020 at 09:57, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <f4bug@amsat.org> wrote:
> >> Why not make it a generic container in the MachineState and create
> >> the container in hw/core/machine.c::machine_initfn()?
> >
> > I don't think we create containers like that for any other
> > machine, do we?
>
> No but maybe we could. Most boards have some GPIO/LED/reset switch
> button. Do all machines have a NUMA memory device? Do all machines
> have a dtb? Do all machines use NVDIMM devices? I think we have
> more machines using GPIOs than machine using NVDIMM. Anyway I don't
> mind, I was just trying to figure where this container belong on QOM.

I think that if machines were qdev objects with the usual
reset/gpio/etc capabilities, I might have just implemented
this as part of the machine object; but they aren't, and
it didn't really seem like the right approach to create an
ad-hoc "container that sort of corresponds to the whole
machine". Also, since these machines are largely orphan
I tend to favour smaller-scale interventions that push them
in a better direction rather than more sweeping changes.

thanks
-- PMM