Qdev status

qdev Status

qdev is a QEMU-internal API for device configuration and creation. It's the machinery that makes -device and device_add / device_del possible. Devices are being converted to qdev, and qdev evolves along with that. This page tracks how far we got, and what's still left to do.

Host/guest split

• Drives done
  • Host side: -drive if=none,id=<name>,<parameters>
  • Guest side: -device virtio-blk-pci,drive=<name>

• Character devices done
  • Host side: -chardev pty,id=<name>
  • Guest side: -device isa-serial,chr=<name>
  • A few small issues remain, e.g. -device isa-serial still requires -serial none to work. See "default optional devices" below.

• NICs are still in RFC stage. Gerd and Mark posted patches for discussion. Mark proposed -netdev, similar in spirit to -chardev.

PC driver conversion status

• PIC, APIC, CPUs, memory not converted
• i440FX/PIIX3 done (host bridge, ISA bridge, USB, IDE) except for ACPI (PIIX3 function 3)

• ISA FDC, PS/2 keyboard & mouse, RTC, serial, parallel done
• Working on nicer defaults for -device serial and parallel

• VGA done (all variants, ISA & PCI), except for ROMs (see "option ROMs" below)

• NICs partly converted, missing are host/guest split (see above) and boot ROMs (see "option ROMs" below)

• Audio done, except for a few rarely used ISA devices

• Virtio done, except virtio-console still needs chardev hooked up (Amit's working on it as part of vmchannel)

• SCSI done

• USB HID (tablet, mouse, keyboard), storage, hub done.
• USB serial, net, host (pass-through) serial partly converted.

• IDE disks done, but see "default optional devices" below

• Watchdogs done

• Bluetooth not converted

• Option ROMs not done, but getting very close

Default optional devices

QEMU creates a bunch of optional devices (NIC, CD-ROM, VGA, ...). Some of them can be suppressed, some not. Default devices get in the way when you work with -device & friends. For instance, ide1/master is untouchable, because QEMU insists on putting a CD-ROM there. Being discussed upstream.

Hot plug

device_add / device_del are on par with -device: Any device you can create with -device you can hot-plug with device_add / device_del. As long as it's hot-pluggable, of course.

drive_add is on par with -drive. May still need drive_del.

Still need equivalents to -chardev and future -netdev (what drive_add is to -drive).

Resources

Gerd's git tree