Re: modular tcg

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

On 7/29/21 4:22 PM, Claudio Fontana wrote:
> On 7/29/21 1:34 PM, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
>> On 7/29/21 12:44 PM, Claudio Fontana wrote:
>>> On 7/29/21 12:29 PM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>>>>   Hi,
>>>>
>>>>> And another comment: I think we should have some progress on ARM with
>>>>> the kvm/tcg split and with the KConfig of boards, before we continue
>>>>> here.
>>>>
>>>> Why?  This can easily be tacked in parallel.  We can flip the switch
>>>> for modular tcg per target in meson.build.
>>>>
>>>> take care,
>>>>   Gerd
>>>>
>>>
>>> Because in the end we need to do this for ARM too and for the other archs 
>>> too (s390 is already ok),
>>>
>>> and in order to be sure not to end up in a dead-end, I think it would be 
>>> good to have at least a sketch for the other archs as well..
>>>
>>> Just my 2c ofc, I think really here still ARM is behind, and we should help 
>>> it catch up.
>>>
>>> If I had more time I would have pushed more on the ARM series, but.. yeah.
>>
>> IIUC Alex is waiting 6.2 release to respin.
>>
> 
> How does the Kconfig for ARM improvements go? I mean I think those 
> improvements (enabling only compatible boards with the chosen accelerators) 
> are important for both tcg-kvm split and possibly for modularization of ARM 
> accelerators too right?

I think we all (Alex/you/me) reached the same point where builds work
but current the testing framework isn't ready for non-TCG or
modularized-TCG so the CI ends failing.

I don't want to push for 'CI build-only' because most of the annoying
problems were from runtime (interfaces not resolved, ... which are
important when using modules or board with unavailable devices).

I tried to address that with a QMP command to query accelerators but
there is a disagreement whether we should query for available/built-in/
loaded/modularized-but-not-installed/...). At this point I think I
fairly understand the technical problems but misunderstand the big
picture here, in particular w.r.t. management apps. I spent too many
time on this to appear enthusiastic, sorry.