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Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:40:28 +0530
From: Amit Shah <amit.shah@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] virtio-serial: A guest <-> host interface for
	simple communication
Message-ID: <20090624170632.GA24285@amit-x200.redhat.com>
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	<20090624164049.GE14121@shareable.org>
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To: Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>
Cc: qemu-devel@nongnu.org, kvm@vger.kernel.org, virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org

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