On 08.11.2017 10:44, Gerd Hoffmann wrote: > On Wed, Nov 08, 2017 at 09:09:00AM +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: >> On Tue, Nov 07, 2017 at 11:28:28PM -0300, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote: >>> Deprecated since 2.9.0, guests should be able to use "pc" instead. >> >> Isn't isapc important to allow QEMU to old operating systems that >> predate the PCI era. > > They should work fine. The early pci chipsets like the piix4 have > built-in backward compatibility. The IDE controller can be driven by > simply accessing the isa ide ports. Likewise vga. You can plug in ne2k > (we have both isa and pci variants) for ethernet and sb16 (isa too) for > sound. > > That should make guests which don't know anything about pci happy. > >> I do recall seeing some messages about specific >> cases where you cannot use the 'pc' machine type and we suggested >> used of 'isapc' instead, but can't remember the exact details.. > > I'd like to see such use cases where isapc is actually required.
Just my 0.02 €: I like the idea of keeping isapc. It's a way to remind the x86 folks that there are also architectures without PCI / APIC / ACPI. And this helped to spot some bugs in some HMP commands in the past already. > Well, nobody maintains it. Nobody tests it. At least we've got the automatic boot-serial-test now that checks that the machine is not completely broken. Thomas