On Fri, Apr 4, 2025 at 10:30 PM Daniel Henrique Barboza
<dbarb...@ventanamicro.com> wrote:
>
> Commit 5b4beba124 ("RISC-V Spike Machines") added the Spike machine and
> made it default for qemu-system-riscv32/64. It was the first RISC-V
> machine added in QEMU so setting it as default was sensible.
>
> Today we have 7 riscv64 and 6 riscv32 machines and having 'spike' as
> default machine is not intuitive. For example, [1] is a bug that was
> opened with the 'virt' board in mind, but given that the user didn't
> pass a '-machine' option, the user was using 'spike' without knowing.
>
> Being explicit in the command line is desirable when we have a handful
> of boards available, so deprecate the default machine setting from
> RISC-V.
>
> [1] https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/2467
>
> Suggested-by: Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <phi...@linaro.org>
> Signed-off-by: Daniel Henrique Barboza <dbarb...@ventanamicro.com>Reviewed-by: Alistair Francis <alistair.fran...@wdc.com> Alistair > --- > docs/about/deprecated.rst | 17 +++++++++++++++++ > 1 file changed, 17 insertions(+) > > diff --git a/docs/about/deprecated.rst b/docs/about/deprecated.rst > index 76291fdfd6..0f41a99c67 100644 > --- a/docs/about/deprecated.rst > +++ b/docs/about/deprecated.rst > @@ -304,6 +304,23 @@ online to check that this board did not completely > bitrot yet). It is > recommended to use another MIPS machine for future MIPS code development > instead. > > +RISC-V default machine option (since 10.0) > +'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' > + > +RISC-V defines ``spike`` as the default machine if no machine option is > +given in the command line. This happens because ``spike`` is the first > +RISC-V machine implemented in QEMU and setting it as default was > +convenient at that time. Now we have 7 riscv64 and 6 riscv32 machines > +and having ``spike`` as a default is no longer justified. This default > +will also promote situations where users think they're running ``virt`` > +(the most used RISC-V machine type in 10.0) when in fact they're > +running ``spike``. > + > +Removing the default machine option forces users to always set the machine > +they want to use and avoids confusion. Existing users of the ``spike`` > +machine must ensure that they're setting the ``spike`` machine in the > +command line (``-M spike``). > + > > Backend options > --------------- > -- > 2.49.0 > >
