Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 00/19] RFC: Reporting QEMU binary capabilities

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Jun 07, 2010 at 09:58:11AM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> On 06/07/2010 09:42 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >As everyone here agrees, having management apps parse -help output
> >to determine the QEMU capabilities is not at all nice, because it
> >is an ill-defined&  fragile data format. Looking more broadly these
> >same issues apply to all the other command line options that accept
> >a '?' flag for querying capabilities.
> >
> >We have a very nice structured data format we could be using for
> >this: JSON. What's lacking is code to output all this information
> >in the JSON format. This patch series can thus be summarized as
> >'JSON for everything'
> >   
> 
> I'm slightly skeptical that JSON is the right format for this TBH.
> 
> >For reference, here is the full list of information libvirt currently
> >queries from QEMU:
> >
> >   * Detection of command line flags (-help parsing)
> >
> >     -no-kqemu, -no-kvm, -enable-kvm, -no-reboot
> >     -name, -uuid, -xen-domid, -domid, -drive
> >     -vga, -std-vga, -pcidevice, -mem-path
> >     -chardev, -balloon, -device, -rtc, -rtc-td-hack
> >     -no-hpet, -no-kvm-pit-reinjection, -tdf
> >     -fsdev -sdl
> >   
> 
> Most of these things can be associated with a config option and/or a 
> version.

If the 'qemu-config.c' file had parity with the config options
that were available as argv then I would not suggest including
the argv data at all. This patchset is an attempt to provide
all the information we need based on current state of the QEMU
codebase, since qemu-config is seriously incomplete at this time.
If we instead want to make a concerted effort to finish porting
all existing config options over to the new style qemu-config.c 
format, that would definitely be much nicer than reporting about
argv.

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: Red Hat, Engineering, London    -o-   http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://deltacloud.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org        -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: GnuPG: 7D3B9505  -o-   F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|