Re: [Qemu-discuss] Hardware component emulation

[Peter Maydell]

On 16 July 2016 at 23:38, Federico Vaga <address@hidden> wrote:
> I'm super new to qemu and I would like to understand more about the hardware
> components emulation. I surfed for some hours on the internet but I cannot
> find much help.
> By looking at the source code in the 'hw' directory of the qemu git repository
> I can vaguely guess how it works but I would like to see some explainations: a
> manual.

Sorry, we don't really have much internals documentation. The
source code is the most accurate reference. Most devices are
fairly straightforward: they implement one (occasionally more)
MemoryRegion, which corresponds to a bank of registers that
will be mapped into the emulated system's address maps. And
they provide also some interrupt (irq) lines and perhaps some
input or output GPIO lines.

> Then a question. Are these hardware modules dynamically loadable by qemu as
> external modules? I mean, can I compile a hardware component out of the qemu
> tree and load it in the qemu I get from the distro? In other words: I would
> like to have something like Linux kernel modules (.ko) that I attach to qemu
> when I launch it.

No, we don't have devices as modules. We do have some module
support, but this is intended primarily to allow distributions
to split out parts of QEMU which have dependencies on
external shared libraries, so that users who don't need
(for instance) the glusterfs support can just not install
the optional QEMU modules rather than having to pull in
a lot of dependent packages for a feature they're not using.
Our modules code (deliberately) does not support loading a
module from one compile into a QEMU built with another
compile -- there is no stable API/ABI within QEMU. So
loading a separate module into a distro-supplied QEMU will
not work.

thanks
-- PMM