On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 02:29:00PM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
On 08/22/2011 12:06 PM, Saggi Mizrahi wrote:
libvdisk is a library that packages qemu's handling of disk images. This
allows for other programs to link to it and get access to qemu image
file abstractions.
To use install the lib and #include<vdisk/block.h>
all the bdrv_* functions work as expected.
Signed-off-by: Saggi Mizrahi<address@hidden>
It's a good idea in principle but the approach is far too naive.
The block layer needs a good bit of modularization first. Test
cases need to be written, and most importantly, using the library
shouldn't require writing a bunch of dummy functions.
There are also licensing practicalities which can cause us
some trouble/pain. For example:
######################################################################
+# libvdisk
+
+vdisk-obj-y = $(block-obj-y)
+
+vdisk-obj-y += qemu-tool.o qemu-error.o
+vdisk-obj-y += $(oslib-obj-y) $(trace-obj-y) $(block-obj-y)
+vdisk-obj-y += $(qobject-obj-y) $(version-obj-y) qemu-timer-common.o
$(block-obj-y) pulls in 'aio.o' which is built from aio.c which
is licensed "GPLv2 only". So even those many files are BSD
licenses, the combined work will be GPLv2-only. Unfortunately ending
up with a libqemublock.so which is GPLv2-only is as good as useless
for libs/apps since it is incompatible with both LGPLv2(+) and GPLv3.
Now in this case aio.c is labelled as Copyright IBM / Anthony,
so IBM could likely resolve this licensing to be more widely
compatible. This could^H^Hwould become a non-trivial task if we
need to look at many files& then also any patches accepted to
those files from 3rd parties over the years :-(