[Qemu-devel] Transitioning from HMP to QMP for QEMU

[Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com>]

What is the status of QEMU's transition from HMP to the QMP interface?

My current understanding is that QEMU provides new HMP commands for
humans, but HMP is being phased out as an API.  Management tools
should rely only on QMP for new commands.  That would mean new HMP
commands are not guaranteed to produce backwards-compatible output
because tools are not supposed to parse the output.

On the libvirt side, new QEMU features should only be supported via
the json monitor in the future (i.e. human monitor patches should not
be sent/merged)?  Existing HMP commands will still need the human
monitor support in order to handle old QEMU versions gracefully, but
I'm thinking about new commands only.

Does everyone agree on this?  I think this is an important discussion
if we want our management interface to get better and more consistent
in the future.

Stefan