Currently for both qemu-system-arm and qemu-system-aarch64
the default board model if the user doesn't specify one
is the 'integratorcp'. This is a totally arbitrary historical
accident since it was the first board to be modelled.
That board is now just one target among many for us, and
is a very poor choice of default:
* it's an ancient board that is now only found in the
junkpiles of longtime ARM/Linux hackers, if at all
* it's an ARMv5 CPU, when most distros are now assuming ARMv7
* it's pretty much unmaintained in QEMU
* it doesn't even have versatilepb's advantage of supporting PCI
Making it or any other board the default serves only to confuse
people new to ARM who expect something more like the x86 monoculture,
and try to run a Linux kernel built for some random devboard on
QEMU's integratorcp model by mistake
This series removes the is_default marker from integratorcp,
to give users a nudge that they need to think about which board
they want a QEMU model of.
Since it's now more likely that users will hit it, patch 2
improves the slightly cryptic error "No machine found." to
align with the rather more helpful text produced if you ask
-M no-such-machine.
This is a little late in the 2.0 cycle, but on the other hand
the patches themselves are trivially simple, and the only
question really is if we want to do this. It does break
backwards compatibility of command lines with anybody who
is still really running integratorcp kernels and not bothering
to specify "-M integratorcp". But 2.0 is a nice round number
to do that, and I think we improve usability for people who
don't realise that the default is wrong for 99%+ of users.
Peter Maydell (2):
hw/arm: Stop specifying integratorcp as the default board
vl.c: Improve message when no default machine is found
hw/arm/integratorcp.c | 1 -
vl.c | 3 ++-
2 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
--
1.9.0
