[Qemu-devel] Re: RFC for new features

[Emmanuel Charpentier <charpent@bacbuc.dyndns.org>]

Dear Fabrice,

First and foremost, thank you for this marvelmous piece of work !

Fabrice Bellard wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As porting the SDL version to other OSes than Linux seems to become an 
> important issue, I plan to add the following features in the next days:
> 
> - Virtual console handled by SDL (Ctrl-Shift-F1 to get the guest screen, 
> Ctrl-Shift-F2 to get the monitor shell, and maybe Ctrl-Shift-F3 for 
> various logs).

I fail to see the point for use in a GUI. Maybe for "autonomous" screens (à 
la Linux virtual consoles) ?

> - Support for more compressed and cow disk images formats so that 
> filesystems without hole support can use cow disk images too.

Nice idea ! Maybe also support for raw devices (dedicating a full HD to a 
given guest OS might be quite justifiable in some setups...) ?

> - New tool to create disk images, to compress them and to convert 
> between any disk image formats.

Corrolary of the previous one.

> - Config file support (syntax: qemu mypc.qmu)

This one is *the* most important ! enables easy use and configuration by 
non-technical users (hint : use an easily-parsed format, allowing for GUI 
frontends).

> Comments ?

I have some further ideas, which need to grow up a bit before public 
exposure. Furthermore, I'm still at odds with some difficulties with the 
current version (CVS from end June), that I want to solve before asking for 
more ...

					Emmanuel Charpentier