Re: [Qemu-devel] Qemu Guest Tools

[Brad Campbell <brad@wasp.net.au>]

Jim C. Brown wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 01:44:35PM +0100, Oliver Gerlich wrote:
> 
>>Planned features are:
>>-Notification of guest when it is loaded with loadvm
> 
> 
> Why?
> 
> 
>>-Time synchronisation between host and guest (currently guest time is 
>>wrong when loadvm is used)
> 
> 
> Technically this is a qemu bug and should be fixed in qemu.
> 
> Of course, any way to set the time in qemu guest w/o having to patch qemu
> source is welcome.

I run an ntp client inside windows.

> 
> 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.

>>Copy/paste and time sync could be done by external programs (Joshua 
>>mentioned mpcb; ntp, ...).
> 
> 
> I'm not sure if ntp would work for qemu guest. The way qemu works, guest changes
> to the RTC are overridden by qemu. Of course if the guest kept its own time
> independent of the hardware clock, that wouldn't be a problem.

It does. I use anachron for windows.

> 
>>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.

Regards,
Brad
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