Re: [Qemu-devel] Cirrus bugs vs endian: how two bugs cancel each other out

[Avi Kivity]

On 07/30/2012 03:08 PM, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-07-30 at 14:58 +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
>> Let's balkanize some more then?
>> 
>> No, qxl is our paravirt vga, we should improve it instead of spawning
>> new ones (which will be horrible in the eyes of the next person to look
>> at them).  You should also be getting the drm driver for free.
>> 
>> http://spice-space.org/page/DRM
> 
> "Free" is a big word here, I wouldn't be surprised if it was totally
> endian busted :-)

Probably... well fixing endianness is the price of doing business if
you're big endian.

> 
> Why so much effort into a bad design on top of a crack transport btw ?
> Is it just RH politics of there's a good reason hiding somewhere ? Some
> kind of morbid fascination for anything Windows ?

It was indeed designed for Windows, which is the prime target for
desktop virtualization.  As to the rest, I don't know much about it,
except that no politicians were involved in the design.

> 
> People I've talked to around in the community seem to agree that some
> minor improvements on qemu-vga are worthwhile, so I'm doing them,
> nothing drastic, mostly having a mirror of the legacy IO registers in an
> MMIO BAR so it's more usable for non-x86 platforms, and I'm about to add
> some simplistic 2D blit facility so we can have a semi-decent fb console
> over vnc. I can trivially do an equivalent of cirrusdrmfb for it so we
> get X mode setting / RandR.
> 
> That gives us a baseline for mostly unaccelerated 2D.

That's fine.

> Something tells me that getting that spice/qxl gunk will be more than a
> trivial effort (but I might be wrong) and I'm reluctant to start
> committing effort on it since so far I yet have to see it being actually
> picked up by people.

I think it's prudent to wait until it's merged upstream, then we can
take another look to see why ppc is so special that it can't just use it
after fixing any endianness issues.

-- 
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