Re: Making QEMU easier for management tools and applications

[Kashyap Chamarthy]

On Thu, Jan 02, 2020 at 02:47:22PM +0000, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 21, 2019 at 10:02:23AM +0100, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> > Stefan Hajnoczi <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> > > 2. scripts/qmp/ contains command-line tools for QMP communication.
> > > They could use some polish and then be shipped.
> > 
> > MAINTAINERS blames them on me, but they're effectively unmaintained.
> > Prerequisite for shipping: having a maintainer who actually gives a
> > damn.
> ...
> > * scripts/qmp/qmp-shell
> > 
> >   Half-hearted attempt at a human-friendly wrapper around the JSON
> >   syntax.  I have no use for this myself.
> 
> I think this one is used by people.  John Snow comes to mind.

FWIW I too frequently use 'qmp-shell'.  And some of the examples in this
document[1] are demonstrated with it.

I'm reasonably happy with it (particularly the persistent history
captured in ~/.qmp-shell_history), and it has some "known issues" that
can trip up a new user.  The one that immediately jumps to mind:
asynchronous events won't be printed without a prompt from the user --
e.g. after a `blockdev-commit`, you won't see BLOCK_JOB_{READY,
COMPLETED} events printed unless you manually hit enter from the
'qmp-shell'.

(Not complaining; I have a long-standing TODO to make time to
investigate this.)

[1] https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/interop/live-block-operations.html

> > > 3. python/qemu/ contains Python modules for managing a QEMU process
> > > and QMP communication.  This should be packaged in distros and
> > > available on PyPI.
> > 
> > Currently maintained by Eduardo and Cleber (cc'ed) under "Python
> > scripts".

Yeah, that'd certainly be useful.  I vaguely recall a discussion on this
topic here on the list (or probably some hallway discussion, can't
recall.)


[...]


-- 
/kashyap