From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([140.186.70.92]:39187) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1RbAxR-0003J6-Fq for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:02:51 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1RbAxN-0006fx-Fd for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:02:45 -0500 Received: from mail-fx0-f45.google.com ([209.85.161.45]:55763) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1RbAxN-0006fr-8T for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:02:41 -0500 Received: by faao26 with SMTP id o26so2319128faa.4 for ; Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:02:40 -0800 (PST) MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:02:40 +0000 Message-ID: From: Stefan Hajnoczi Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Subject: [Qemu-devel] Transitioning from HMP to QMP for QEMU List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: libvir-list@redhat.com, qemu-devel Cc: Kevin Wolf , Anthony Liguori , Adam Litke , Luiz Capitulino 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