Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] FDT as a git submodule?

[Peter Maydell]

On 26 January 2013 10:11, Andreas Färber <address@hidden> wrote:
> You forget that a "distro" is pretty much a Linux concept. There is no
> such thing on W32 (openSUSE doesn't package it for MinGW either), and on
> Darwin the various competing ports systems suck IMO.
>
> On OpenBSD there's a "dtc" port but we'd need to assure it's installed
> on the build bots before we mandate it, same for the Linux build bots.

Even on Linux having a libfdt that's available to compile against
is a comparatively recent thing -- it was only early 2012 IIRC that
Debian/Ubuntu got this, for instance.

> I'm not objecting to mandating it but would like to propose to only
> mandate it for the targets that need it. I.e., if no libfdt available,
> don't install microblaze and ppc softmmu targets. That would still allow
> the average user to emulate x86 or arm without hassles, and it should
> not be needed for linux-user.

I'm leaning towards making FDT compulsory for ARM too: the kernel
is moving strongly in this direction and it is just annoying to
get a qemu that gives up when it encounters an FDT. The only reason
I haven't so far is just that availability in distros/OSes is too
spotty. An in-tree libfdt would solve that.

> The pixman submodule has not been working well for me, it's not a
> universally working solution to be copied either.

OTOH libfdt is:
 * less than 4000 lines of code, half of which is the public .h file
 * specifically intended by upstream to be taken and dropped into
   other peoples' projects (this is how you have to use it if you're
   a bootloader, for instance)
 * built by just having your usual make process compile and link
   in an extra seven .c files

I don't know if we'd use a git submodule though -- we only want
a single subdir of upstream's git repo, not the whole thing.

-- PMM