[Qemu-devel] Re: The State of the SaveVM format

[Juan Quintela]

"Michael S. Tsirkin" <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 10:47:27AM +0200, Juan Quintela wrote:
>> Notice that there are plans for VMState to do more interesting things
>> like:
>> - Be able to show the values in a saved image
>> - See if a VM is able to load a vmstate (i.e. it has the needed devices
>>   at the needed versions)
>> - .....
>> 
>> That ones are independent of what we decided for the previous problems.
>> 
>> Comments?  Things that I missed for the discussion?
>> 
>> Later, Juan.
>
> Another idea was to switch to some standard format, like qdev machine
> description format or xml, so we don't have to maintain our own.

Are you serious here?  Qemu don't trust the avalavility
autoconf/automake/gnulib/glib/... and other useful libraries, and now we
are gonig to require an xml library or qdev machine format (a library
that don't do releases and is not packaged) for somethnig core of qemu?

> All state besides the physical memory dump is normally very
> small, so this won't have much overhead.

> This is possible if we give up on backwards compatibility completely.

If we give up on backwards compatiblity, we fix at least half of the
problems, independently of swiching to a new format :)

Later, Juan.