[Qemu-devel] [RFC] Machine description as data

[Paul Brook]

> Look, my goals are rather modest.  I want to start where we are, put
> devices behind a nice abstract interface one by one, picking apart the
> pc.c hairball on the way.  The idea is not to design the perfect,
> all-encompassing abstract device interface, just to capture what we
> need, and extend as we go.  The abstract device interface makes a simple
> machine builder possible, driven by tree-structured configuration.  That
> in turn makes it easier to make things configurable.  Which can be
> expected to lead to more configurability, when and where there's a need
> for it.
>
> All this can be done in nice, safe baby steps.  I don't need to come up
> with an all-singing machine description fit for a picky kernel before I
> can start doing something useful.
>
> Now, if you hand me such a configuration on a platter, I'd be a fool not
> to take it.  The catch: I need one for a PC.

I suspect these two goals may be contradictory. The PC machine is so hairy 
that you need a singing, dancing machine description to be able to describe 
it.

OTOH if what you really want to do is configure the host binding side of 
things, then as I've mentioned before, I see that as been somewhat separate 
from the actual machine creation, and trying to combine the two is probably a 
mistake. I really don't want users to have to hack the machine config just to 
change the name of an image file.

Paul