Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH for-2.12] hw/riscv: Fix crashes with "-nodefaults"

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 23/03/2018 15:04, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> However, if the machine is emulating a real-world board with a fixed SoC
>> and fixed hardware in the SoC, it makes more sense to create a null backend.
>
> That's a lot of duplicate code to say "oh, this is NULL, create the
> null backend" in lots of different boards :-(

Note it's a null "backend", not necessarily a null "character device".
Your proposal, namely ensuring that be->chr == NULL is handled properly
in qemu_chr_fe_init, would be just fine.

The main point was that the choice of whether to create the device is up
to the board, and there isn't a single answer valid for all boards.

Paolo