Hi all, I am looking at the possibility to add a new QEMU configuration option to make TCG optional (in qemu-system-*). What I am exploring is a way to exclude any of the TCG code not needed by KVM from the QEMU binary. There has been a previous attempt in the past from Paolo Bonzini, namely https://github.com/bonzini/qemu/tree/disable-tcg, that eventually was not upstreamed. I was looking into this work mainly, mostly to understand if the same approach can be respinned and used to support all the QEMU's targets. Any input on this is welcome.
I was also wondering if an approach could be based on the recent patch series that allows to use the TCG frontend as a library -- https://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg415514.html. Making qemu-user and qemu-system users of such a library might help in having TCG optional. Obviously this solution introduces many other challenges and I'm not even sure if it's actually viable. I would like to hear your opinion on this, ideally to identify what would be the best direction to follow for bringing this new feature into QEMU. Thank you, alvise
