Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 1/4] Add i.MX FEC Ethernet driver

[Peter Maydell]

On 7 May 2013 01:39, Peter Crosthwaite <address@hidden> wrote:
> There may also be cases where machine model want to create a NIC
> regardless of whether its used or not. Relevant for sysbus NICs as we
> don't have the luxury of a PCI probe process so a generic guest (e.g.
> a kernel and its pre-canned dtb) may assume a NIC exists and crash if
> the sysbus device is not there. I'm half tempted to pull out the
> nb_nics conditionals on Zynqs NIC creation for this very reason.
> Bottom line is we shouldn't have to rely on a -device or -net arg at
> all to get a NIC.

I agree here -- we should just always create all the
hardware the embedded board has. I think the nb_nics conditional
stuff is legacy (not all board models do it).

>>> In other words, it's an undocumented hack :(
>>> Scary as it sounds, for this case I like documenting
>>> internal names better.
>
> +1 and give machine-model created NICs a reasonable naming scheme.
> Could we also expose the names to the monitor somehow so they can be
> looked up easily?

This is basically asking for -global to work on instance
names rather than class names, I think. Sounds like a
reasonable idea.

-- PMM