Re: [Qemu-devel] Ongoing changes to the displaying code

[Avi Kivity]

Anthony Liguori wrote:
> I assume you're looking to do this in order to support functionality 
> like in the Android simulator.  So that if you're using QEMU to 
> emulator a hand held device (cell phone, whatever), you can have 
> something that looks like that device.
>
> The problem is, your GUI is going to want all the feature of a normal 
> GUI.  Context menus, perhaps a tool bar, etc.  Maybe you want animated 
> button clicks or even the buttons to make noises when clicked.  
> Inevitably, it'll bloat to a full blown GUI.  Not very useful for us 
> virtualization folks so we'll also want our own GUI.  Then things get 
> ugly because should it be one GUI or two separate ones?  Another way 
> to do this is to separate out the GUI logic so it's not directly tied 
> to QEMU.  This has been discussed many times and there are a lot of 
> advantages to using an external GUI.  Namely, you can close the window 
> without exiting the simulation.

Instant messaging clients seem to have solved this without resorting to 
multiple processes.

> If you build a simple app that exec()'s and connects to QEMU via VNC, 
> and use something like gtk-vnc, you could build just what you're 
> looking for very easily.  It's all portable to Windows too and LGPL 
> licensed.  You could even develop in a higher level language like 
> Python and you'd get to use file dialog widgets, context menus, and 
> all that good stuff without worrying about recreating that in SDL.
>
> I think that's a better route to go for this sort of thing.  If you 
> think it's generally useful, I think it'd also be worthwhile to host 
> within the QEMU project.  I just don't think it's the right thing to 
> add into QEMU directly.

Or it could be done as a separate executable that links to a libqemu.so; 
the standard qemu binary could be implemented the same way.

Applications spanning multiple processes are clunky and inefficient.

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