[Qemu-devel] Status of SDL2 and GTK displays: can we make display modular?

[Michael Tokarev <mjt@tls.msk.ru>]

Hello.

What's the current status of SDL2 and GTK support?
Last time I checked and asked, there were some missing
pieces in SDL2 compared with SDL1, basically making
SDL2 unusable (again, compared with SDL1).

GTK backend, besides the menu, does not add any noticeable
functionality to SDL1 interface, but adds a lot of extra
dependencies.  This, and also the fact that at least
initial GTK support was incomplete, was the reasons why
in Debian we didn't change default display backend from
SDL1 to GTK when qemu changed the default.

Now I wonder if we can finally switch to SDL2 and/or to
GTK, and maybe even make the display backend dynamically
loadable in the same way as block device backends are
these days.

With loadable display backend it will be the last bastion
for many people who are asking for "minimal QEMU for
servers" which is supposed to not have any X deps.
I started working on loadable display backend a few
years ago, but quickly discovered that SDL1 can't be
loaded dynamically, at least on some platforms where
it substitutes main() function in order to do some
initialization (as if there's no support for constructors).

So now I'm asking again whenever current GTK and SDL2
supports are complete enough to replace SDL1.

Thanks,

/mjt