On 7 May 2013 01:39, Peter Crosthwaite <peter.crosthwa...@xilinx.com> wrote: > There may also be cases where machine model want to create a NIC > regardless of whether its used or not. Relevant for sysbus NICs as we > don't have the luxury of a PCI probe process so a generic guest (e.g. > a kernel and its pre-canned dtb) may assume a NIC exists and crash if > the sysbus device is not there. I'm half tempted to pull out the > nb_nics conditionals on Zynqs NIC creation for this very reason. > Bottom line is we shouldn't have to rely on a -device or -net arg at > all to get a NIC.
I agree here -- we should just always create all the hardware the embedded board has. I think the nb_nics conditional stuff is legacy (not all board models do it). >>> In other words, it's an undocumented hack :( >>> Scary as it sounds, for this case I like documenting >>> internal names better. > > +1 and give machine-model created NICs a reasonable naming scheme. > Could we also expose the names to the monitor somehow so they can be > looked up easily? This is basically asking for -global to work on instance names rather than class names, I think. Sounds like a reasonable idea. -- PMM
