Re: [Qemu-devel] Doing a Tcl/Tk based frontend

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 05:52:14PM -0500, John Morris wrote:
>   
>> On Thu, 2006-06-15 at 17:29, Oliver Gerlich wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> If you are familiar with Tcl/Tk, maybe you could give some hints on how
>>> to embed the Qemu window into such an app?
>>>       
>> Embedding the emulator's window might not be the best way to attack the
>> problem.  Especially since you would need to be able to detach it to be
>> able to go full screen.  I have pondered the Tk frontend idea before so
>> lemme dump my random thoughts on the subject and see how many holes get
>> punched in em.
>>     
>
> With the new VNC server capability there is no need to embed the emulator's
> existing window. You can just have a GTK/QT widget which acts as a VNC client
> taking the video feed & displaying directly within the GUI management app. 
>   

I definitely think this is the write approach too.    I'm still at the 
proof-of-concept phase those.  The VNC client code seems to work well 
(it's asynchronous and uses glib) but I haven't integrated it into a 
widget just yet.

This is coming straight off my hard drive so YMMV.

http://hg.codemonkey.ws/gvnc/

> Similarly you can redirect the QEMU monitor console to a UNIX pipe when 
> lauching QEMU, so the management app can fully control the QEMU engine
> to do suspend/resume, snapshots, media changesi.
>
> I wrote an GUI app in Python which did the latter already:
>
> http://people.redhat.com/berrange/olpc/sdk/olpc-qemu-admin-demo.html
>
> At the time I wrote it there wasn't any VNC support in QEMU, so I couldn't
> hook up the display, but with the 0.8.1 release it wouldn't be much effort
> to embed the display directly in the app via VNC. So I don't think there 
>   

The tricky part is the VNC widget.  Reusing any of the existing vnc 
clients isn't really an option.  The client end of the protocol has way 
too many states making a state machine really nasty.

I ended up settling on a coroutine based approach which I'm sure will 
raise some eyes.  Of course, one could easily replace the coroutines 
with threads though (I just have an aversion to threading.

I've also got code laying around for basic software scaling which I also 
think is important for proper fullscreen support.  Just need a little 
more free time :-)

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> are any changes required in QEMU itself to be able to create a fully
> featured QEMU frontend easily on a par with VMWare Desktop, if not better.
>
> Regards.
> Dan.
>