On 09/05/2010 11:05 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
We don't have a massive pool of developers sitting on their hands
waiting for something else to work on. We don't have myriads of
users demanding better Windows support. Search the list, there's
almost no one asking questions about Windows and considering that
it's missing a ton of features and constantly broken, that strongly
suggests that no one is actually using it.
Or maybe, real users don't use the git repository, so they aren't
aware of the constant breakage.
We're not talking about has been broken for 6 months. Windows support
has been shady in QEMU as long as I've been involved in the project
which is pretty much as long as Windows support has existed.
IOW, the Windows port is really a "work in progress" that hasn't made
any progress.
Windows support in QEMU is an academic exercise that's only of
interest to developers.
I'm perfectly fine with dropping it. btw, there are other features in
qemu that seem to be academic exercises - *-user for example. What is
it useful for? Most open source stuff is multiplatform, and serious
commercial work needs something faster than tcg.
A good example of where -user is being actively used is for doing cross
builds.
A lot of build systems have proper cross compiler support and many still
generate special programs and expect to be able to run them. So an
alternative to the traditional --cross-prefix is to setup a linux-user
based root and replace GCC/LD with cross compilers. That let's the
native build system be used and the lion share of the work is done with
native code.
Regards,
Anthony Liguori
I can understand cross-cpu system mode being very useful to embedded
or kernel developers. x-on-x is only useful with virtualization,
otherwise the performance penalty is too great.
