On Tue, 17 Feb 2026 at 09:42, Paolo Bonzini <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 2/17/26 10:31, Peter Maydell wrote: > > On Tue, 17 Feb 2026 at 05:29, Sergei Heifetz <[email protected]> > > wrote: > >> > >> This patch adds the `audio` option to meson_options.txt. It is > >> propagated into Kconfig as AUDIO. It is enabled by default. > >> The corresponding `--disable-audio` and `--enable-audio` options > >> for `configure` are also added. > >> > >> For now, this option does nothing. In subsequent patches, it will > >> gradually disable audio in different places. The final goal is to stop > >> building sources from `audio/` and `hw/audio/` and other audio-related > >> files (except for some stubs). Note that this intent is different from > >> `-audio none`, which mutes audio but still compiles the audio subsystem. > > > > Not building audio/ code makes sense, but do we really want to > > stop building hw/audio code ? That's the guest facing audio > > devices, and if for instance a machine type has an embedded > > sound device that would require us to stop compiling that > > machine. I think it would be very confusing for users if > > --disable-audio meant "we will silently not build half the > > Arm boards that have a pl041 in them". > > > > Maybe it would be better if "--disable-audio" meant "don't build > > the audio backends, and everything behaves as if the user > > passed -audio none" ? > > The problem is that "-audio none" uses a silent backend but still keeps > all the audio/ code around. If you prefer to keep the Arm boards > around, the solution would be to disable the audio code in the > individual pl041 devices with "#ifdef CONFIG_AUDIO", so that the > "depends on AUDIO" for pl041 can be removed too.
This seems weird, though -- why would we put in a lot of ifdefs in every single audio device, when we could instead say "if you disable audio at build time what you get is something that presents the same API as the existing audio backends but does nothing" ? Also, I think we should be consistent here, not put ifdefs in some devices we think are "important" but skip it in others. thanks -- PMM
