Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Add QEMU DirectFB display driver

[Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de>]

On 18.05.2010, at 00:54, Anthony Liguori wrote:

> On 05/17/2010 05:49 PM, Alexander Graf wrote:
>>>>  Then we could still offer a separate SDL based viewer that could do the same things it does now. But we'd also open up the gate for a whole new integration level with possible GUIs.
>>>> 
>>>>       
>>> You could, but I think it introduces more complexity which just is going to get in the way of building a good GUI.
>>>     
>> The main benefit I see by taking an always-vnc approach would be that everything becomes 100% networkable. There's nothing getting in your way because you're doing things on a remote machine. And you even get the same look&feel you got from the local connection because it's the same tool connecting you.
>>   
> 
> My current thinking with GUIs is that network transparency is more trouble than it's worth.
> 
> The problem is, simple things end up being overly complicated.  You can't just pop up a file dialog box to select a new CD-ROM ISO because you can't browse files on a remote machine.  Instead, you need to have something like a "pool" concept or something like that.

Yeah - VMware solved that by showing you a dialog with the remote file system. Pretty ugly.
Another solution to that would be to only enable the dialog box when target == localhost.

As soon as we look at server workloads, we do need to have network transparency. But I guess most of this talk is moot anyways, since we have VNC now. So if there is someone willing to take up on a GUI, he can just do so the same as he could with a unified backend.


Alex