Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] opengl rendering in the sdl window

[Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>]

Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> > A nice thing about VNC-SHM would be the GUI could run on a different
> > machine to the emulator (SHM not used then), since it only needs VNC
> > and monitor, which can both be remote.
> 
> For the remote case it certainly doesn't make sense to reinvent VNC.

It doesn't make sense to use a completely different protocol in _every
way_ for the local case than the remote case, does it?

> But you'll probably use some management layer like libvirt anyway then,

Nope.

> ssh'ing into the remote machine for starting / stopping VM's isn't very
> handy.

I disagree: it's exactly the same as the local case in every respect,
except you put the words "ssh host" before the qemu/kvm command you
would have run locally.

This holds even for a hypothetical GUI app running locally which wraps
a VNC widget and has some QEMU control buttons.  It just needs to know
the qemu/kvm command it runs starts with "ssh host ...".

If there was a GUI app which runs well locally - why would you want to
use something completely different to control a VM which happens to
run on another machine?  That would be a really annoying and
artificial distinction.  The same GUI controls are useful in either case.

> I'm targeting the local desktop use case.  But maybe vnc +
> shmem-extention works equally well here.

It's worth a try.

Personally I run a few local kvms and a few remote kvms and I can
hardly tell the difference.  Either way I run a kvm command, then a
VNC client.  (I stopped using SDL after accidentally killing VMs by
clicking on the close button too many times.)

-- Jamie