Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] add "info ioapic" monitor command

[Anthony Liguori]

On 12/31/2009 12:38 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
> On 12/31/2009 12:46 AM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> > > I wasn't worried about that, only the increased code duplication.
> >
> >
> > I wasn't thinking there would be an info ioapic command but rather a
> > generic device-info command that would work with any qdev device. No
> > code duplication (in fact, much, much less in the long term).
>
> Machine printing isn't going to work. The information needs to be
> formatted to be legible and bit fields decoded. Some field's
> interpretation may depend on the value of others.

The cases where you want to have complex display of a device's state is 
the exception and it should be treated as such.

The common case is where you just want to see the state of the device. 
We support hundreds of devices.  We can have one code path that displays 
95% of them with a couple devices that have exceptions or we could have 
hundreds of these commands that aren't consistent because they're all 
open-coded.

 In some case machine
> printing of vmstate will show you the history of that devices live
> migration bug fixes in addition to its state.

I don't see this as a bad thing.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori