Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 0/5] backdoor: lightweight guest-to-QEMU backdoor channel

[Lluís Vilanova]

Anthony Liguori writes:
[...]
> Why should this analyzer live outside of QEMU in the first place?  I fail to 
> see
> the rationale for that other than not wanting to do the work of making it
> suitable for upstream consumption.

For the same reason that SystemTap lets you add user-provided code into the
trace hooks, you never know what the user actually wants. The difference is that
when dealing with traces that require a high bandwidth, different people may be
interested on analyzing different events and under different conditions, and
having a JIT in QEMU comes in handy to optimize the traces. This includes the
generation of extra tracing code at translation time (e.g., I generate checks in
TCG to establish when I want to trace a specific event, and someone else may
just want to increment a counter using TCG code).

Guest trace instrumentation turns QEMU into a highly-performant tool for dynamic
binary instrumentation, with all the benefits that stem from QEMU (support for a
myriad of target architectures, as well as support for both full-system and
user-level applications).

I can understand if someone thinks this is not a desired feature for QEMU [1],
but not including it into upstream will just turn it into a patch-based feature
that will rapidly fail to apply on top of upstream QEMU.

[1] Of course, I will still contribute support for guest tracing, as well as the
    guest events I added.


Lluis

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