Re: [Qemu-devel] Monitoring Screen Activity in QEMU/KVM

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 07:47:47AM +0530, Shehbaz Jaffer wrote:
> I want to determine the amount of screen activity taking place on VGA
> monitor/ Screen for different applications (eg. playing vlc video, normal
> typing.)
> 
> When I do not start the X server, I can easily determine the screen
> activity by counting the number of pages accessed in the region 0xA0000 -
> 0xBffff (This is the VGA Monitor region in boot screen).
> 
> However when I start the X Server, A diffrent set of pages are hit. Could
> anyone please explain how the VGA Monitor works in QEMU?

qemu emulates a PCI device.  Probably an ancient Cirrus Logic CL 5446,
but other devices are possible.

> Or if someone
> could suggest an alternate solution to determine amount of screen activity
> while playing diffrent applications?

I would take an existing VNC client and modify it to log the "screeen
activity" you want to log.  VNC is a well-documented protocol, there
are several high quality open source clients [gtk-vnc is the one I'd
pick], and doing this means the guest can run at full speed.

It depends a lot on how you define "screen activity".

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top