Hi, I'd like to know the opinion of the QEMU community on some topics.
In 2021, a pair of patch sets for drivers of the Linux IIO subsystem was proposed based on some QEMU hacks that added virtual devices with which it was possible to test the proposed modifications to the Linux kernel [1, 2, 3]. Most Linux IIO drivers connect to the system through either SPI or I2C. So, it ends up that these buses are needed to do some tests on IIO drivers. Because of that, those QEMU changes included hacks to the virt platform to add SPI or I2C buses. The documentation says that virt is a generic virtual platform [4]. In this regard, adding more buses to virt could turn the platform into something less generic. However, if support for SPI/I2C were added, then it would reduce the effort needed to develop virtual devices to aid driver testing. Before putting effort to develop something concrete, I'd like to ask just to make sure: Would SPI/I2C support be a good addition to QEMU virt? Another possibility would be to add support for SPI and I2C buses on Raspberry Pi boards emulation [5]. Would this be a better idea? Also, the QEMU devices developed could be upstreamed. At first, I thought that developing virtual devices would be a win-win situation in which we could extend Linux's test coverage and add support for new QEMU devices. However, as these would be dummy devices, I'm not sure how QEMU would benefit from them. Anyhow, I'd appreciate it if anyone could give a word about that. Thanks, Marcelo [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-iio/20210314181511.531414-1-ji...@kernel.org/ [2] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-iio/20210614113507.897732-1-ji...@kernel.org/ [3] https://github.com/jic23/qemu [4] https://qemu-project.gitlab.io/qemu/system/arm/virt.html [5] https://qemu-project.gitlab.io/qemu/system/arm/raspi.html
