Re: Making QEMU easier for management tools and applications

[Peter Maydell]

On Mon, 27 Jan 2020 at 11:56, Kevin Wolf <address@hidden> wrote:
> If you have a long-lived production VM that you always run with the same
> configuration, then yes, having a config file for it in the file system
> is what you probably want. Currently, for this case, people directly
> using QEMU tend to write a script that contains the command line. I
> think I do have such scripts somewhere, but their number is very small.

I have some similar scripts, which I use for launching one-off
"run and then kill soon" VMs, mostly as test setups. The
advantage of a script is that you get an actual programming
language and can do things like "substitute in the name of
the directory the script lives in" when setting up parameters
that are filenames, or easily support "this is a default, and
you can override it with an environment variable". So I'd
still need to have a script even if the script changed from
"run QEMU with these command line options" to "create a temp
file with this config and run QEMU on it".

thanks
-- PMM