Re: [PATCH 1/8] build-system: clean up TCG/TCI configury

Hello!

On 1/13/21 3:23 PM, Helge Deller wrote:
>> This is what that TCG interpreter provides for. eg would anyone
>> really want to emulate aarch64 guest when runing on a hppa host ?
>
> In debian many packages directly and indirectly depend on the qemu
> source package, because it provides - beside the emulator - various
> userspace tools which are necessary natively, like e.g. qemu-img.

I agree, that this a problem and it would be great if QEMU could be fixed
that it builds on all targets, not necessarily with all features available.

Currently, it looks like this:

> https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=qemu&suite=sid

Note: The build failure on sparc64 is a bug in the device-tree-compiler
package which has not been fixed in Debian yet, see:

> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=977031

> In the past building those tools failed on hppa because the configure script
> detected that neither native TCG nor TCG interpreter support was possible.
> As such the configuration aborted and no tools were built.
> So, the change should still make it possible to enable building the userspace
> tools.

I agree.

> On the other side, sometimes even a slow TCG-interpreter enabled qemu
> for other arches can be useful. It's not about speed, but about the
> *possibility* to emulate small pieces of different code, e.g.
> cross-compilers, bios-tools and such. It's not used often, but it
> can be handy.

I also agree here.

> That said, if it doesn't hurt I think we should not disable something
> which can be useful (this applies to all architectures).

True.

Adrian