Re: DeviceState definition

[Peter Maydell]

On Tue, 30 Nov 2021 at 22:53, abhijeet inamdar
<abhijeetinamdar3005@gmail.com> wrote:
> What difference does it make to define:
>
> DeviceState *nvic;
>
> nvic = qdev_create(NULL, TYPE_ARMV7M);

This creates a new device in freshly allocated memory,
both initializing and realizing it, and returns a pointer
to that newly created device.

> vs
>
> DeviceState *armv7m;
>
> armv7m = DEVICE(&s->armv7m);

This is not creating anything. It's just a cast -- it
is exactly like "armv7m = (DeviceState*)(&s->armv7m);"
except that it does a runtime typecheck that the pointer really
is pointing to an initialized object of the right type.
Unless the field s->armv7m has been previously correctly
initialized, the typechecked cast will assert at runtime.

> Can you please explain me because I'm confused between two machines
> which I want to adapt for my custom machine which is based on
> Cortex-M3.

I think what you're looking at is that there are two ways
of creating devices:
 * call functions that allocate memory, initialize a device
   in that memory, and return you a pointer; your device
   or machine state struct has fields which are "Foo *foo".
 * use "in-place" initialization, where the device or machine
   state struct has fields which are "Foo foo", and then
   you call functions which initialize that field.

Mostly new QEMU code uses the second strategy, but there's
still a fair bit of code that does the first. You should
prefer the second, I think.

-- PMM