Hi,
I have been using qemu to simulate various types of custom hardware
for testing purposes. Rather than having to recompile qemu every time
I change a hardware simulation, I instead patched qemu to support
dynamically loading hardware plugin files at run time. The basic idea
is that you can specify .so files to load on the command line when you
boot qemu. These files will be dlopened by qemu at run time, and will
register themselves as hardware to the appropriate hardware controller
(ie a PCI device hardware plugin registers itself with the PCI bus).
I was hoping to get people's reactions to / interest in this sort of
feature. Currently I have patched qemu to work for my own purposes,
which required having to hack around some issues I ran into. These
hacks do not require major changes in how qemu works, but are rather
structural changes. For example, the qemu header file naming structure
does not lend itself to being installed to somewhere like
/usr/include/qemu, and would need some changing. This includes
changing 'include "config.h"' to include 'include "qemu/config.h"' due
to the common use of config.h by other packages, as well as working
through the issues of how to structure things for building qemu
hardware plugins against multiple architecture types.
I am more than willing to put all the effort into turning this into a
nice patch, if there is a maintainer interested in helping me shepherd
this into the mainline.
Thanks,
Andre Pech
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