Re: [Qemu-devel] virtio-serial: A guest <-> host interface for simple communication

Amit Shah
2009-06-24T17:11:12Z

On (Wed) Jun 24 2009 [17:40:49], Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Amit Shah wrote:
> > A few sample uses for a vmchannel are to share the host and guest
> > clipboards (to allow copy/paste between a host and a guest), to
> > lock the screen of the guest session when the vnc viewer is closed,
> > to find out which applications are installed on a guest OS even when
> > the guest is powered down (using virt-inspector) and so on.
>
> Those all look like useful features.
>
> Can you run an application to provide those features on a guest which
> _doesn't_ have a vmchannel/virtio-serial support in the kernel?
>
> Or will it be restricted only to guests which have QEMU-specific
> support in their kernel?

libguestfs currently uses the -net user based vmchannel interface that
exists in current qemu. That doesn't need a kernel that doesn't have
support for virtio-serial.

Amit