[Qemu-devel] Tips for adding "sendkeys"

[David Barrett]

Hi there, can you give me any tips for where to get started adding a new 
function "sendkeys" to the monitor that is essentially like "sendkey" 
except for multiple keystrokes?

I'm using Qemu for some automated testing (in conjunction with AutoIt on 
the guest XP image) and it's working great.  Essentially, I've set up:

1) A stock XP guest image with all windows closed except for a big 
command prompt that has keyboard focus.

2) A script on the Linux host that launches the guest with "-loadvm" and 
"-monitor stdio" that uses "sendkey" to start an AutoIt script inside 
the guest.

The AutoIt script does all the heavy lifting of actually running the 
automated test.  However, I need "sendkey" in order to download the 
latest test script into the guest OS, and then to run it.

This works fine today, but I'm finding my Linux host scripts full of 
long strings of:

        sendkey ret
        sendkey a
        sendkey kp_decimal
        sendkey a
        sendkey u
        sendkey 3
        sendkey ret

I'd much rather do something like:

        sendkeys wget http://10.0.2.2/script.au3\ret
        sendkeys script.au3\ret

I'm guessing this is a very straightforward addition to the monitor 
code.  However, the Qemu source is rather imposing and I'm not sure 
where to start.

Can someone give me some file and function names to start looking 
around?  Something along the lines of:

"Oh, that should be simple.  Open up foo.c and look for function bar(); 
it lists all the monitor commands.  Add "sendkeys" to the list, and 
implement it in foo_impl.c.  I recommend just calling "foo_sendkey()" as 
you loop across the string.  Also, be sure to increment "numcommands" in 
"foo_func.h" else it'll destroy the universe."

Any tips you have would be appreciated.  Thanks!

-david