Re: [PATCH v26 00/20] i386 cleanup PART 2

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

On 3/8/21 2:52 PM, Claudio Fontana wrote:
> On 3/8/21 2:27 PM, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
>> Hi Claudio,
>>
>> On 3/8/21 1:57 PM, Claudio Fontana wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> anything else for me to do here?
>>>
>>> The latest rebased state of this series should be always available here:
>>>
>>> https://gitlab.com/hw-claudio/qemu/-/tree/i386_cleanup_8
>>>
>>> When it comes to the ARM cleanup series,
>>> I would like to have the tests pass for ARM, before doing even more 
>>> changes, could you help me there Philippe?
>>>
>>> Maybe applying some of your changes on top would fix the failures? I tried, 
>>> for example with the arm-cpu-features ones, but it didn't work for me..
>>
>> TBH I wrote these patches during my personal spare time and this
>> became a real Pandora box that drained too much energy. I prefer
>> to step back and focus on finishing smaller tasks before burning
>> out. That said I appreciate your effort and am interested in
>> following / reviewing your work.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Phil.
>>
> 
> Thanks Philippe for sharing this, and I agree completely, it is very draining.
> 
> The effort of making tests happy that run in artificial environments in 
> particular often feels to me
> as too disconnected from actually ensuring that there is no real run time 
> regression.
> 
> qtest_enabled() (implicitly, or explicitly via open-ended else statements) is 
> another painful variable to keep in mind in cpu and machine code, so it is 
> not helpful in my view.
> 
> I'll try to push more to get the tests running again, if you have any comment 
> or idea, feel free to just point me in the right direction,
> that is very valuable to me, even without working code.

Basically I gave up after realizing from Daniel reviews that we need
QMP commands to query QEMU at runtime its built-in features, so we
have build-agnostic tests easier to maintain. I agree this is the
best way to resolve this particular case, but also scale for various
other cases.