Re: [Qemu-devel] QEMU GUI

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>]

Kevin F. Quinn wrote:
> Part of that should be to determine what the GUI will actually do;

You're getting ahead of yourself.  Just getting qemu to start with 
wxWidgets instead of SDL would be a big step in the right direction.

> At this point you're talking about embedding the Qemu guest window
> directly into the wxWidgets GUI, yes?  I'm thinking the primitives that
> the graphics driver in QEMU is emulating are not at the GL level, but
> at the raw hardware level - I don't know how far apart these things
> are, but I'd hazard that a GL canvas won't really help.
>   

QEMU doesn't expose any real 2d acceleration to the drawing routines.  
Using GL canvas would be interesting though as you'd get hardware 
scaling with interpolation.  That's a big performance win.

> I do think the ability to pass through accelerated graphics stuff from
> the guest to the host should be a big factor.  I assume this is what
> the cirrus emulation currently does through SDL, to some extent at
> least. This issue would make or break guest graphics performance.
>   

Nope, currently SDL is used as one big bitmap viewer.

> I'm ignorant of details, but from a vague hand-wavy distance it should
> be simple enough to retain SDL for the emulation windows (and SDL does
> seem to be the tool for the job there), with a separate wxWidgets
>   

Bleh, why would you say that?  SDL is pretty crappy on X.  It's just a 
wrapper around XShmImage.  You can access the same thing via GTK or any 
other reasonable toolkit.

SDL is mostly useful because of the number of backend drivers that it 
supports.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> frontend GUI to manage the launch and visibility of emulation windows,
> assist in guest creation etc.
>
> Perhaps it's worth asking the WxWidgets people what they might suggest.
>
>   
>> Regards,
>>
>> Anthony Liguori
>>
>>     
>>> If someone is interested, I am ready to try to include such a GUI
>>> in the QEMU repository even if it is not usable yet.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Fabrice.
>>>
>>>
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