Re: [Qemu-devel] Tips for adding "sendkeys"

[David Barrett]

I agree, it's only for convenience.  Sendkey is great for individual 
keystrokes, but it's not super convenient for batches of keystrokes.

Incidentally, what's the policy for patch submission to Qemu?  If I 
write this patch and submit it, what are the odds that it would get 
accepted in the mainline?

If the policy is only bugfixes and functional enhancements are accepted 
(a reasonable policy), then I'll just make due -- I don't want to tie 
myself to a custom fork forever.

But if the policy includes convenience additions like this, then I might 
take a crack at it.

Thanks!

-david

Alexander Graf wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> On Feb 28, 2008, at 10:39 PM, David Barrett wrote:
>
> > 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 don't really think that is needed. The sendkey command was implemented 
> to send real keystrokes. A 'sendkeys' can always be simulated using 
> multiple strokes.
>
> > 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
>
> You could just create a script/program that converts your command line 
> to several 'sendkey' commands. An idea of how to implement that in C is 
> attached.
>
> > 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.
>
> This would be monitor.c. Afaik every handling of the monitor command 
> line is done there. I still don't really think it's necessary.
>
> Alex