Re: [Qemu-devel] Unmaintained QEMU builds

[Anthony Liguori]

On 09/05/2010 11:05 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
> > We don't have a massive pool of developers sitting on their hands 
> > waiting for something else to work on.  We don't have myriads of 
> > users demanding better Windows support.  Search the list, there's 
> > almost no one asking questions about Windows and considering that 
> > it's missing a ton of features and constantly broken, that strongly 
> > suggests that no one is actually using it.
>
>
> Or maybe, real users don't use the git repository, so they aren't 
> aware of the constant breakage.

We're not talking about has been broken for 6 months.  Windows support 
has been shady in QEMU as long as I've been involved in the project 
which is pretty much as long as Windows support has existed.

IOW, the Windows port is really a "work in progress" that hasn't made 
any progress.

> > Windows support in QEMU is an academic exercise that's only of 
> > interest to developers.
>
> I'm perfectly fine with dropping it.  btw, there are other features in 
> qemu that seem to be academic exercises - *-user for example.  What is 
> it useful for?  Most open source stuff is multiplatform, and serious 
> commercial work needs something faster than tcg.

A good example of where -user is being actively used is for doing cross 
builds.

A lot of build systems have proper cross compiler support and many still 
generate special programs and expect to be able to run them.  So an 
alternative to the traditional --cross-prefix is to setup a linux-user 
based root and replace GCC/LD with cross compilers.  That let's the 
native build system be used and the lion share of the work is done with 
native code.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> I can understand cross-cpu system mode being very useful to embedded 
> or kernel developers.  x-on-x is only useful with virtualization, 
> otherwise the performance penalty is too great.