Re: [Qemu-devel] WE NEED GCC 4 please

[Alexander Graf]

On Jan 21, 2008, at 4:39 AM, Mulyadi Santosa wrote:

> Hi...
>
> If I may jump into the pool...
>
> > I plan to work around the MinGW issue by guarding the offending  
> > part by
> > "#ifdef GCC...", even if I have been told that it works only by  
> > chance
> > (but it works, whereas any other option I tried does not).
>
> Ehm, should we better wait a bit for fabrice to complete his code code
> generator? then we can be freed (totally?) from gcc version
> dependency? it's not that I ignore people's effort to make qemu gcc4
> compatible...but I just think it will save us from more work in the
> future (making it always gcc 3 compatible) and thus progress to more
> demanding area like truly support SVM/VT,  better SMP and so on.

Fabrice's code generator works for x86 and x86_64 only. In the second  
step it _will_ break existing miniops, so all the work put into those  
will be in vain.

I really don't see any valid point not to implement code that makes  
everything work for gcc4 if it doesn't break existing setups. Actually  
everyone benefits if there are alternatives. Imagine you could use  
qemu with gcc3, gcc4 or Fabrice's new approach (probably tcc). This  
way nobody needs to have a specific version of their compiler suite  
installed and ppc, s390 etc. will still be supported.

Support for SVM/VT is something KVM is about. I completely agree that  
qemu and kvm should be merged someday, but if I look at the length of  
discussions and amount of patches actually getting applied to qemu, I  
rather think it's not the right time to do it. You also get full SMP  
support from KVM too, so I don't see any valid point in complaining  
about that in qemu.

Regards,

Alex