[Qemu-devel] Re: [RFC] qemu-gui based on wxWidgets and libvncclient

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@cs.utexas.edu>]

Marc André Tanner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> During the last few weeks i was playing around with the idea to
> implement a GUI for qemu and so this is what i came up with.

Cool.  You should checkout virt-manager.  It has much the same mission 
as what you describe.

> Since i am still pretty new to C/C++ development (in fact i would call
> this my first real world C++ application) and not familiar with qemu
> internals i decided to implement the GUI independent of qemu itself. So
> from a technically point of view i just call qemu with arguments to
> redirect the monitor to stdio and to export the display to vnc (-monitor
> stdio -vnc display). I then try to capture and embed the vnc display
> within the GUI that's where libvncclient[1] comes in.

I have no experience with libvncclient.  I think the general idea of 
using VNC to create an external QEMU GUI is a good one.  Previously, I 
had posted some patches for a shmem GUI that used a custom control 
channel.  After hacking on that for a little bit based on some feedback, 
I've come full circle and am now under the view that extending VNC is a 
better long term approach.

So, I've reserved some pseudo-encodings and a client message type and am 
now working on some VNC extensions to enable better QEMU integration.

My current client code is available at:

http://hg.codemonkey.ws/vnc-gui/

The VNC extensions are still a work in progress but documentation is here:

http://tocm.wikidot.com/vncextensions

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> It's this last step which doesn't yet work as expected. It is extremely
> slow and/or crashes after some time. But since i am not that experienced
> in both multi threaded gui and wxWidgets programming i am stuck.
> 
> So i hope someone from the list can help me here, the two most important
> files for this issue are vncpanel.cpp and vncdisplaythread.cpp.
> 
> My current development snapshot can be found at 
>     http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/qemu-gui/doku.php/download
> but don't expect it to actually work it's still buggy and in pre alpha
> state.
> 
> Any comments, ideas, patches and so on are highly appreciated.
> 
> At this point i would like to thank Johannes Schindelin for his help
> with the integration of libvncclient.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Marc
> 
> [1] http://libvncserver.sourceforge.net/