> the "irqchip" option, if you note, is not x86-specific, in any case. > Any machine has an irqchip. The first idea was to use something like > "apic=in_kernel|userspace" which would be, that, very x86-centric.
How is this not x86-pc specific? All you're doing is creating two different machines, one with an APIC and one without. In principle this is no different to what we have with pc v.s. isapc. If you want machine properties (to avoid having to enumerate all the available machine variants) then these properties should be machine specific. Incidentally, you patch appears to allow creation of a machine with a cpu that claims to have an APIC, but without an APIC present. Is that intentional? Paul