We have been complaining for a long time about how the floppy controller and floppy drives are combined in a single qdev device and how this makes the device awkward to work with because it behaves different from all other block devices.
The latest reason to complain was when I noticed that using qdev device names in QMP commands (e.g. for media change) doesn't really work when only the controller is a qdev device, but the drives aren't. So I decided to have a go at it, and this is the result. It doesn't actually change any of the inner workings of the floppy controller, but it wires things up differently on the qdev layer so that a floppy controller now exposes a bus on which the floppy drives sit. This results in a structure that is similar to IDE where the actual drive state is still in the controller and the qdev device basically just contains the qdev properties - not pretty, but quite workable. The commit message of patch 3 explains how to use it. In short, there is a '-device floppy' now and it does what you would expect if you ever used ide-cd. The other problem is old command lines, especially those using things like '-global isa-fdc,driveA=...'. In order to keep them working, we need to forward the property to an internally created floppy drive device. This is a bit like usb-storage, which we know is ugly, but works well enough in practice. The good news here is that in contrast to usb-storage, the floppy controller only does the forwarding for legacy configurations; as soon as you start using '-device floppy', it doesn't happen any more. So as you may have expected, this conversion doesn't result in a perfect device, but I think it's definitely an improvement over the old state. I hope you like it despite the warts. :-) Kevin Wolf (3): fdc: Add a floppy qbus fdc: Add a floppy drive qdev fdc: Move qdev properties to FloppyDrive hw/block/fdc.c | 255 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------- vl.c | 1 + 2 files changed, 211 insertions(+), 45 deletions(-) -- 1.8.3.1
