Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 2/2] hw/arm: Add Arm Enterprise machine type

[Andrew Jones]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 03:03:40PM +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> On 25 July 2018 at 14:59, Andrew Jones <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 01:47:00PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> >> Would iut make any sense to call the machine  "refplatform"  or "refboard"
> >> to indicate it is a generic reference platform, not specifically following
> >> any particular real impl, albeit influence by the sbsa spec.
> >>
> >
> > That would indeed stop me from whining about a machine model with an
> > 'sbsa' name not strictly implementing a minimal SBSA machine :-)
> >
> 
> I still don't get why only a minimal machine is worth considering,
> given that a real-world minimal SBSA machine is not capable of doing
> anything useful.

One definition of an SBSA machine can be quite different than another.
If we only hard code the required [useless] base, but also provide a
readconfig for the rest, then we get a useful machine without loss of
flexibility.

That flexibility comes at the cost of platform-bus code (since we need
to add devices to the system bus) and a less concise command line. The
platform-bus code may indeed be too expensive for this purpose, but
we may need to see patches to be sure. I understand the desire to have
a shorter command line, but this is QEMU :)

Thanks,
drew