Re: [Qemu-devel] Adding Save States menu items

[Eric Blake]

On 10/06/2016 11:17 AM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> 
> 
> On 06/10/2016 18:04, Programmingkid wrote:
>> 'Save State...' would call something equivalent to the monitor command 
>> savevm.
>> It would display a dialog box asking to give a name to this save. The default
>> name would probably be "save state mm-dd-yyyy - n". The m,d,y stand
>> for month, day, and year respectively. The n would be the save state
>> count for that day.
>>  
>> 'Restore state...' would probably display a dialog box with all the save
>> states displayed in a list. The user could select one of them and
>> QEMU would restore that state.
> 
> These are of course savevm and loadvm.

Which are somewhat limited in their power - they don't always work if
the user does hotplug in between.

>> Code in the gui would detect if the hard drive image was in a format that
>> supported save states. The menu items would probably be grayed out if
>> save states could not work with the current HD image file. 
> 
> Ok, this makes sense.  Thanks for explaining it!  I think this would be
> nice to have in the GTK+ interface.

I don't know - libvirt already learned the hard way that qcow2 images
alone are not ideal for saving machine state; and libvirt ended up
creating its own save state format that consists of a concatenation of
libvirt XML and the qemu migration format.  And the problem of how to
revert to a state with different devices than the guest currently has
seems rather difficult to squeeze into a GTK app that only manages a
single VM.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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