[Qemu-devel] Unified device model

["Stanislav Shwartsman" <stl@fidonet.org.il>]

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Hello All,

 

It is not a secret that all open source emulators (QEMU, Bochs, Xen) use the
same emulated devices and mostly copy-paste their emulation one from
another.

I don't know who originally wrote the device models but now Bochs and QEMU
maintain two similar implementations of the same devices.

If one of the teams fixes the implementation or add functionality, another
team mostly copy-paste the changes to their model.

Xen project forked from QEMU and want to stay in touch with Bochs and QEMU
device models and contribute the changes to make the model better.

I am wondering about making unified device models architecture for open
source simulators.

The device models will be used in QEMU, Bochs, Xen and other open source
simulators which would use the device models.

I know about two professional teams working in simulation which would like
to use these device models in their simulator and 

could enrich the device library with new devices device interfaces, for
example with AGP and 3D graphics.

Bochs is already in middle of definition of new true pluginable devices
architecture. 

In near future Bochs devices will fully separatable from Bochs binary and
when could be developed separately from Bochs.

I call to QEMU developers join to this project and come with their
requirements to plugin architecture.

I don't know if QEMU supports device plugins now but I would like to see
QEMU a part of this idea, 

I would like to get single device shared library which could be loaded to
Bochs and QEMU and work perfectly for both.

This will eliminate the need to maintain two separate implementations of the
same devices, 

these implementations very fast will converge to single one, C or C++ based,
Bochs or QEMU based, doesn't matter.

I am listening for your opinions !

 

Thanks,

Stanislav


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