[Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH 0/4] fix/add CONFIG_* options for VMWare device emulation

[Blue Swirl]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 7:55 AM, Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 02/01/2011 07:10 PM, Blue Swirl wrote:
>>
>> One way to solve this which would preserve the device model would be
>> to add stub devices. For example, hw/vmmouse-stub.c would be:
>> void *vmmouse_init(void *m)
>> {
>>     return NULL;
>> }
>
> This is the wrong direction, unless you can somehow automatically generate
> the stub file.
>
> The only other solution I can think of is weak symbols.  There are subtle
> differences between Windows and Linux weak symbols, but luckily we do not
> care about it.  See http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2010-04/msg00281.html

Boards should create optional devices so that failure in the device
creation is handled more intelligently. For example, pci_vmsvga_init()
is just a wrapper (a bit useless one also) to pci_create_simple(bus,
-1, "vmware-svga"). pci_create_simple() in turn uses
qdev_init_nofail() which aborts if the device can't be created.
Instead, non-aborting version should be used so that if 'vmware-svga'
device can't be initialized, a fallback device (VGA) could be used or
error message printed.

In this case, vmmouse and vmport are not converted to qdev but that
should be done anyway.