J. Mayer wrote: [snip] > > > It restricts the letter to the ones historically allowed by Qemu, not to > > > anything specific to any architecture or hw platform. What I like in my > > > implementation, compared to the strchr..., is that it exactly tells the > > > user which given device is incorrect. > > > > Well, here it makes no difference, strchr tells you exactly same as much. > > Yes, you're right. Was thinking about the original strspn. > > > Instead of the check, the code could also allow everything from 'a' to > > 'z' and then just AND the produced 32bit bitmap with a machine defined > > bitmap that would be part of QEMUMachine. > > I guess we would better stop at 'n', because we can easily define a > semantic for devices 'c' to 'm' (ie hard disk drives in a hardware > platform specific order) but we have to define what means 'o' to 'z'. > But I agree we would better extend it now, instead of having to rework > it later...
To select the network device to boot from would probably become a 'n' 'o' 'p' 'q' series. [snip] > > > Here's a second pass cleanup, adding the machine dependant checks for > > > the PC machine and the PowerPC ones. As one can see, the OpenHack'Ware > > > firmware is able to boot from devices 'e' and 'f'. For the PowerPC > > > machines, I choosed to try to boot from the first given usable device, > > > some may not agree with this choice. It can be noticed that the > > > available boot devices are not the same for PowerPC PreP, g3bw and mac99 > > > machines. > > > As I don't know the features and requirements for the other > > > architectures, I prefered not to add any check for those ones. > > > > Most other machines ignore -boot and those that don't, shouldn't break > > from the introduced change, so please commit it when you feel ok with > > it. > > I'd like to know what are the feelings around about this patch and if > there are specific requirements and/or problems for some platforms to be > addressed before... I think the proposed scheme (and the implementation) is flexible enough to accomodate all relevant platforms. Thiemo