[Qemu-devel] Feature Request: command line option to validate params without starting an image

[Adam Kennedy <adam@phase-n.com>]

I'm currently writing a large scale image-based testing system.

(for background info) http://ali.as/pita/

Part of this involves a wrapper for Qemu to launch images with generated 
options.

However currently I have no way way to write unit tests for this code 
that I can determine.

What would be extremely useful would be a command line option I could 
add to the beginning (or end) of the options ... say -z to pick 
something at random.

This would cause qemu to do all it's normal pre-startup procedures 
(parse the options, preconfigure and precheck as much stuff as possible) 
and then bail out before allocating the memory or starting the system 
(while somehow confirming the params were ok).

I'm not sure how much work this would be, but it would be 
extraordinarily useful when writing wrappers, since the unit tests would 
typically try to validate 10-20 different combinations of options, and 
booting an image and shutting it down 20 times would be extremely harsh.

Thanks

Adam Kennedy