Re: [Qemu-devel] Qemu Guest Tools

From: "Jim C. Brown" <jma5@umd.edu>
To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] Qemu Guest Tools
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 00:09:06 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20050303050906.GA14446@jbrown.mylinuxbox.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4226916C.8050706@wasp.net.au>

On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 08:24:12AM +0400, Brad Campbell wrote:
> Jim C. Brown wrote:
> >
> >I am against mouse grabbing myself. I just use the no-sdl-grab patch and 
> >deal
> >with a desyncing guest mouse pointer (sometimes I can work around it by
> >turning mouse acceleration off in the guest).
> 
> I was thinking about a little guest app to keep them in sync. This is how 
> win4lin does it and it works very well. It is dead easy to do under windows 
> as mouse manipulation from userspace is a doddle, don't know about linux 
> though.
> 

Does it move the guest pointer back to the spot where the host pointer is (in
which case disabling mouse accerleration would be better) or does it let win4lin
know where the guest pointer is so the host pointer can be moved to that position?

The latter would be ideal, but short of guest-to-host communication there is no
way to be completely sure where the mouse pointer is (tho you can be pretty sure
most of the time).

> >
> >>I've decided against some special i/o port or such because I don't know 
> >>anything about these things :) and because it would require a driver on 
> >>the guest side (is that correct?).
> >
> >
> >Unfortuantly, yes. However, the magic instruction set would not. (You would
> >probably need to reimplement a new one for each arch qemu supports/will be
> >ported to though.)
> >
> 
> This was my thought. Networking is not always available. A couple of IO 
> ports would always be there.

Actually, I think that magic instructions might be better. It doesn't require
a special guest driver and thus it would be easier to develop the tools. IO
ports would be easier to standardize however.

Detecting whether or not they're running in qemu is also a cinch: if they aren't
they get an "illegal instruction" error.

> 
> Regards,
> Brad
> -- 
> "Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability
> to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable
> for their apparent disinclination to do so." -- Douglas Adams
> 
> 
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-- 
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Infinite precision begets infinite perfection.