On Mon, 23 Jan 2023, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
On 22/01/2023 21:48, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
On Sun, 22 Jan 2023, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
On 11/01/2023 00:36, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
On Tue, 10 Jan 2023, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
On 04/01/2023 21:59, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
Secondly it's not clear to me why you've chosen names like
"powermac_3_1" instead of "g4agp"? Does powermac_3_1 uniquely identify
the G4 AGP Sawtooth model? For QEMU it is always best to emulate real
machines, and whilst I understand you want to separate out the two
versions of the mac99 machine, having "powermac_X_Y" seems less clear to
me.
These machine model identifiers are used by Apple to uniquely identify
(all of) their machines since new-world Macs (even modern iPads and Macs
have them) so for Mac people this should be clearer than the informal
names that could get a bit long and confusing as there may be slight
differences within a family. In any case, qemu-system-ppc -M mac99 is not
corresponding to any real Mac so I'd like the options which do emulate
real Macs to be called in a name that show which Mac is that. For the PPC
Macs there's some info here for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4
And everymac.com also has info on all Macs. There were actually more than
one G4 PowerMac with AGP but the other one was informally called gigabit
ethernet. So the model ID is a shorter and better way to clearly identify
which hardware is it (and it's also referenced in the device-tree of
these Macs).
Are you planning to work on different types of G4 Mac where this could be
confusing? Even to me "PowerMac 3.1" doesn't really tell me what model of
Mac is being emulated, whereas "g4agp" (much in the same way as g3beige)
is much more friendlier to people interested in using QEMU for Mac
emulation.
This is similar problem as some people like to call Mac OS X versions by
number and some by big cats names. Personally I prefer version numbers
because it's easy to tell which is newer or older that way without
remembering a nomenclature or having to look it up every time. It would be
good if others interested in this also shared their preference because if
it's only us two with different views then it's hard to make a decision. I
still think machine ID is better also because then these machines would be
grouped in the -machine help output like the others but as long as we don't
have other machines that start with a g or other Macs that have some other
name it might work so I could change the naming if that's all needed for
this to get in.
I'd lean towards the g* naming, because not only is it more obvious to less
technical Mac users what is being emulated, it matches the existing precedent
set by g3beige.
The g3beige is not a good example as model ids were introduced with new
world Macs and the beige G3 is one of the last old world ones which had a
numeric ID so we can't give that a name by model ID. All later Macs though
have a model ID which is a short and clear way to idenfify a model. Found
a list here:
https://www.macupgrades.co.uk/store/mac_model_id/
and it even carries on for modern Macs:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201634
and it's listed in System Profiler next to the model name:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201581
so it should be pretty obvious and familiar to Mac users. So I think
anything else would be more confusing but I don't care that much as long
as we can have a separate name for each machine we emulate. I'll take
whatever names you come up with if that's what it takes for this patch to
get merged. Please tell me what names you want and I'll change it if
nobody else votes fot the names I've proposed.
Regards,
BALATON Zoltan
