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Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:30:23 -0500
From: Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>
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Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 01/11] QMP: Introduce specification file
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To: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
Cc: "ehabkost@redhat.com" <ehabkost@redhat.com>, Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@eu.citrix.com>, "jan.kiszka@siemens.com" <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>, "dlaor@redhat.com" <dlaor@redhat.com>, "qemu-devel@nongnu.org" <qemu-devel@nongnu.org>, Luiz Capitulino <lcapitulino@redhat.com>, Filip Navara <filip.navara@gmail.com>, Vincent Hanquez <tab@snarc.org>

Avi Kivity wrote:
> On 06/26/2009 11:25 PM, Filip Navara wrote:
>>> I don't think binary data is a requirement.  An FDT should be 
>>> transmitted as
>>> a tree, not as a binary blob.  You could also transmit binary as a 
>>> list of
>>> bytes though.
>>>      
>>
>> You can transmit it as list of bytes and it's woefully inefficient. I
>> gave the FDT as an example, but I believe that binary data may be
>> needed in future for one purpose or another. The monitor already
>> provides a way to dump guest memory and I see no reason to not
>> transfer it using some "binary" encoding.
>>    
>
> Another candidate is screendump.  There's no reason to go through a 
> file.  We could pass a pipe as an fd and request a screendump to that 
> fd, but that's rather roundabout.

Instead of inventing binary syntaxes, maybe we could use dictionary 
syntax to denote a mime encoded value?

So something like:

{"Content-Type": "image/ppm", "Content-Transfer-Encoding": "base64", 
"Content": "AB234SDFSDf=="}

A special brace format could be used if we wanted to make sure it was 
independently parsable:

<"Content-Type": "image/ppm", "Content-Transfer-Encoding": "base64", 
"Content": "AB234SDFSDf==">

But I suspect dicts are good enough.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori