On 23/09/2016 10:10, Markus Armbruster wrote: > For me, the similarity (at the conceptual level) to the persistent > memory case is striking: in both cases, we need a backend to manage > memory contents. The difference is that for persistent memory, changes > persist, while for the loader, they get reverted at reset.
Not just that. For persistent memory, there is a MemoryRegion corresponding to the memory _and_ an interface to manage it. For the loader the contents are copied every time from an out-of-band storage. > An argument for using -device could go as follows: this is a device to > monkey patch memory. It needs a backend to manage the bits, just like > other memory-related devices do. Since its backend is trivial, we > folded it in rather than make it a separate backend. The backend is not just trivial, it is _literally_ a 64-bit value... I think "-object long,value=0x123456789abcdef0 is taking things a bit too far. Paolo > If we decide to use this argument for the present interface design, I > want it recorded in the code and commit messages.
