Re: Making QEMU easier for management tools and applications

["Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@redhat.com>]

* John Snow (jsnow@redhat.com) wrote:
> 
> 
> On 1/24/20 9:38 AM, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> > Hi! :-)
> > 
> > Well, not fighting for it to the death and I'm certainly not married to
> > its exact syntax, but I use HMP all the time because it's convenient to
> > use manually and QMP isn't.
> > 
> > If you want to remove HMP, get us a decent QMP shell first. And ideally
> > a way how to use it without manually configuring a QMP socket and
> > starting up and connecting the shell to it with ten kilometers of
> > command line options on both sides first. HMP is available by default,
> > and so should its replacement be.
> 
> This is partly why I am asking about what a "qmp-shell" should look like
> to be usable, so we can sunset HMP once and for all.
> 
> One idea for a qmp-shell is to implement some of the convenience syntax
> in qmp-shell directly to give us some of the same shorthands, and that
> logic lives in the shell now.

I wonder about generating a set of python bindings for the qmp commands,
and generating wrappers for those, and having the qmp-shell be a python
interpreter with all that loaded.
That way it would be very easy to add extra sugar.

However, I caution that too many people think that QMP has all the type
of diagnostic stuff people want - it's just way too hard and beuracratic
to add a simple diagnostic command to QMP, when you just want to add
something to print some diagnostics out for your corner of qemu.

Dave

> --js
> 
> 
--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilbert@redhat.com / Manchester, UK