Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 01/11] QMP: Introduce specification file

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

Avi Kivity wrote:
> On 06/26/2009 11:25 PM, Filip Navara wrote:
>>> I don't think binary data is a requirement.  An FDT should be 
>>> transmitted as
>>> a tree, not as a binary blob.  You could also transmit binary as a 
>>> list of
>>> bytes though.
>>>      
>>
>> You can transmit it as list of bytes and it's woefully inefficient. I
>> gave the FDT as an example, but I believe that binary data may be
>> needed in future for one purpose or another. The monitor already
>> provides a way to dump guest memory and I see no reason to not
>> transfer it using some "binary" encoding.
>>    
>
> Another candidate is screendump.  There's no reason to go through a 
> file.  We could pass a pipe as an fd and request a screendump to that 
> fd, but that's rather roundabout.

Instead of inventing binary syntaxes, maybe we could use dictionary 
syntax to denote a mime encoded value?

So something like:

{"Content-Type": "image/ppm", "Content-Transfer-Encoding": "base64", 
"Content": "AB234SDFSDf=="}

A special brace format could be used if we wanted to make sure it was 
independently parsable:

<"Content-Type": "image/ppm", "Content-Transfer-Encoding": "base64", 
"Content": "AB234SDFSDf==">

But I suspect dicts are good enough.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori