Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH, RFC 0/5] Improve device info handling

[Blue Swirl <blauwirbel@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Gerd Hoffmann<kraxel@redhat.com> wrote:
>  Hi,
>
>> Add info command registration to the API and make some devices use it.
>
> Jumping in here with a more general comment ...
>
> I think right now we have _way_ to much register_something functions.
> IMHO qdev allows us to kill off most of them.  We can stick function
> pointers (also VMstate pointers) into DeviceInfo instead of registering
> callbacks.

Good idea. I wish reset could be handled also with a structure.

> Short-term (while we are in the "convert-drivers-to-qdev" phase) that will
> just move the register calls from the driver code to generic qdev code.
>
> Long-term we hopefully can kill the register calls altogether and walk the
> qdev device tree instead.

So at this stage, the registration function should take a structure
argument but later it would be sucked into qdev?

>> User visible monitor commands change: 'info' is replaced by 'dev_info'
>> and also the parameter name may change, for example 'pic' becomes
>> 'i8259.state'.
>
> Hmm, i8259 isn't converted to qdev yet, so the route outlined above above
> will not work (yet) for this device ...

There is also no qdev for pc.c. Maybe there should be one qdev for
each board? The higher level could set up common things like system
reset signal, memory, drives etc. Maybe even PCI.