Am 13.10.2021 um 17:30 hat Michael S. Tsirkin geschrieben:
On Fri, Oct 08, 2021 at 03:34:27PM +0200, Kevin Wolf wrote:
It's still a long way until we'll have QAPIfied devices, but there are some improvements that we can already make now to make the future switch easier.
One important part of this is having code paths without QemuOpts, which we want to get rid of and replace with the keyval parser in the long run. This series adds support for JSON syntax to -device, which bypasses QemuOpts.
While we're not using QAPI yet, devices are based on QOM, so we already do have type checks and an implied schema. JSON syntax supported now can be supported by QAPI later and regarding command line compatibility, actually switching to it becomes an implementation detail this way (of course, it will still add valuable user-visible features like introspection and documentation).
Apart from making things more future proof, this also immediately adds a way to do non-scalar properties on the command line. nvme could have used list support recently, and the lack of it in -device led to some rather unnatural solution in the first version (doing the relationship between a device and objects backwards) and loss of features in the following. With this series, using a list as a device property should be possible without any weird tricks.
Unfortunately, even QMP device_add goes through QemuOpts before this series, which destroys any type safety QOM provides and also can't support non-scalar properties. This is a bug, but it turns out that libvirt actually relies on it and passes only strings for everything. So this series still leaves device_add alone until libvirt is fixed.
Reviewed-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
I assume you are merging this?
Yes, I can merge it through my tree. Thanks for the review! Kevin