Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 2/3] qtest: enable qtest for most targets

[Peter Maydell]

On 17 April 2012 21:43, Blue Swirl <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 20:31, Peter Maydell <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Well, it could. But we should make that decision based on whether it
>> makes sense and has a use case for actual users of the board, not
>> because we're trying to get away with not having a setup that lets
>> us properly unit test devices.
>
> I disagree. I see many benefits in qtest and very little downsides in
> changes like these.
>
> qtest is a tool to let developers test the changes they make to
> devices, so breakages shouldn't be so common. This should improve the
> development process in QEMU tremendously.

I'm entirely in favour of having a decent testing framework so we
can easily write unit tests for device models. What I don't understand
is why a developer only unit testing tool seems to require changes
to user visible behaviour across dozens of board models. Something
is wrong in its design somewhere, and I think that's what I'm
objecting to as much as to the specific detail of what's being
changed in this patch. (And I don't want us to add lots of tests
and/or changes to the code before we fix whatever the problem is.)

-- PMM