Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] new SDL keyboard shortcuts to start and stop VM

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 10:16:09AM +0700, Mulyadi Santosa wrote:
> Hi Anthony...
> 
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 5:20 AM, Anthony Liguori <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Mulyadi Santosa wrote:
> >>
> >> IMO, it would be faster if we provide keyboard shortcuts that will
> >> stop and resume VM execution right from SDL guest interface, rather
> >> than switching to console monitor first and type "s" or "c"
> >> respectively.
> >>
> >
> > Is this really common of an operation that you would need an escape key for
> > it?
> >
> > Why are you so frequently stopping and continuing a guest?
> 
> Thanks for giving a review.
> 
> One of the use case is to pause guest at a specific moment relatively
> fast. For example, I boot a guest and I want to capture at a certain
> moment when the guest kernel initialize and print something in the
> screen.
> 
> As these message scrolls fast, I find it more intuitive if we could
> just press a key to pause the guest, giving us enough time to capture
> the display and resume the execution. If we switch to qemu monitor
> first, most of the time we already lost the moment.

If its too slow to switch to the monitor virtual console,then don't
configure the monitor in that way. Set it up to be on stdio, or one
of the other backends. That lets you have both the monitor & SDL
display visible at the same time & would be just as fast to type
in 'stop'  at the appropriate time.

If its kernel text output you need to see then a serial port + logging
is the best option here as Gerd suggests. If its video output you need
to see, then VNC along with something like vnc2swf which will record the
entire VNC data stream to a movie, which you can then play back and
easily pause at any point.

Regards,
Daniel
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