Paolo Bonzini <pbonz...@redhat.com> writes: > On 5/3/23 20:32, Peter Maydell wrote: >> Do we really want to build a QEMU that then barfs unless >> you pass -nodefaults, though ? That doesn't seem very useful. >> Something somewhere ought to be saying "if you want the >> virt board then you almost certainly want these". > > Well, the point is that --without-default-devices is intended to be for > people that write their device config by hand. >
It's a bit hard to maintain the original intention with just documentation. Couldn't we require that --without-default-devices always be accompanied by --with-devices? And more to the point of Peter's question, couldn't we just leave the defaults off unconditionally when --without-default-devices is passed without --with-devices? The coupling of -nodefaults with --without-default-devices is a bit redundant. If we're choosing to not build some devices, then the QEMU binary should already know that. Just to be clear, -nodefaults by itself still makes sense because we can have a simple command line for those using QEMU directly while allowing the management layer to fine tune the devices. In the long run, I think we need to add some configure option that gives us pure allnoconfig so we can have that in the CI and catch these CONFIG issues before merging. There's no reason to merge a new CONFIG if it will then be impossible to turn it off.
