Re: Making QEMU easier for management tools and applications

[Dr. David Alan Gilbert]

* Kevin Wolf (address@hidden) wrote:
> Am 24.01.2020 um 10:50 hat Daniel P. Berrangé geschrieben:
> > On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 04:07:09PM -0500, John Snow wrote:
> > > Well, sure. The context of this email was qmp-shell though, which is
> > > meant to help facilitate the entry of JSON commands so that you *can*
> > > indeed just forego the CLI/HMP entirely.
> > > 
> > > If you are of the opinion that every user of QEMU should be copy/pasting
> > > JSON straight into a socket and we should delete qmp-shell, that's
> > > certainly a fine opinion.
> > 
> > I think part of the pain of qmp-shell comes from the very fact that
> > it is trying to be an interactive shell. This points people towards
> > interactively typing in the commands, which is horrific when you get
> > anywhere near the JSON, or even dot-notation traditional commands.
> > 
> > If it was just a qmp-client that was single shot, we'd encourage
> > people to create the JSON in a sensible way - vim/emacs/whatever.
> 
> I don't see how this is sensible. QMP commands are something that I
> reuse even less than VM configurations, so creating a one-off file for
> each would take me a lot more time and I would still have to type the
> same JSON code that I have to type with -qmp stdio.
> 
> The reason it is and should be an interactive shell is that I'm
> interacting with it. Switching back and forth between a text editor and
> a shell to actually send the command to QEMU would make things only even
> more cumbersome than they already are.
> 
> > Bash/dash/zsh/$whatever is their interactive shell, with massively
> > more features than qmp-shell. You have command history, autocomplete,
> > conditional and looping constructs, and everything a normal shell
> > offers.
> 
> If I wanted to program a QMP client, I would use Python. For me,
> conditionals and loops are completely out of scope for a QMP shell. I
> just want an easy way to tell QEMU to do something specific.
> 
> A command history already exists for qmp-shell. It's better than bash
> because it doesn't mix QMP history with whatever else I do on my
> computer.
> 
> Autocomplete in qmp-shell doesn't exist, as far as I know, but if
> implemented, it could be a lot more useful than bash completion because
> it could offer key completion based on the QMP schema.
> 
> This is in fact a big part of the problem that qmp-shell really needs to
> solve before it can replace HMP: How to make writing commands at least
> almost as simple as with HMP. If I can just press tab a few times to
> cycle through the available options for the command, that would already
> be a massive improvement over writing JSON manually (which you would
> still have to do with your text-file based approach, without any
> QMP-specific support).

Doing all that in a python process (i.e. an actual python shell with a
bunch of qemu commands added) seems easyish.

> The other part that it needs to solve is how to be available by default
> without specifying anything on the command line. Basically, if I press
> Ctrl-Alt-2, I want to get to a monitor shell. If that shell is
> implemented internally or by an external Python process, I don't mind.

That is a harder part. (I rarely use Ctrl-Alt-2 actually; I mostly
use HMP on stdin).

Dave

> > The only strong reason for qmp-shell to be interactive would be if
> > the initial protoocl handshake was too slow. I can't see that being
> > a problem with QMP.
> 
> Speed would be the least of my concerns. This is about manual use, and
> it already takes me a while to type in my commands.
> 
> > Example usage:
> > 
> > 1. Launch the QEMU runtime for the desired target
> > 
> >      $ qemu-runtime-x86_64 myvm.sock
> > 
> > 2. Load the configuration to define the VM
> > 
> >    $ cat myvm.yaml
> >    commands:
> >      - machine_declare:
> >          name: pc-q35-5.0
> >      ...
> >      - blockdev_add:
> >          ...
> >      - device_add:
> >          ...
> >      - blockdev_add:
> >          ...
> >      - device_add:
> >          ...
> >    $ qemu-client myvm.sock myvm.yaml
> > 
> > 
> > 3. Hotplug a disk
> > 
> >    $ cat mynewdisk.yaml
> >    commands:
> >      - blockdev_add:
> >          ...
> >      - device_add:
> >          ...
> >    $ qemu-client myvm.sock mynewdisk.yaml
> > 
> > 
> > 3. Hotunplug a disk
> > 
> >    $ cat myolddisk.yaml
> >    commands:
> >      - device_del:
> >          ...
> >      - blockdev_del:
> >          ...
> >    $ qemu-client myvm.sock myolddisk.yaml
> 
> Just to compare, this is what the human user oriented flow looks like
> today:
> 
> 1. qemu-system-x86_64 -M pc-q35-5.0 -drive if=virtio,... -cdrom ...
> 
> 2. <Press Ctrl-Alt-2 to get to the HMP shell>
>    (qemu) drive_add ...
>    <Press Ctrl-Alt-1 to get back to the guest>
> 
> 3. <Press Ctrl-Alt-2 to get to the HMP shell>
>    (qemu) device_del ...
>    <Press Ctrl-Alt-1 to get back to the guest>
> 
> This is what we're competing with, and honestly I don't see how your
> qemu-runtime-*/qemu-client based flow comes even close to it in terms of
> usability.
> 
> QMP, JSON and YAML may be nice machine interfaces, but having nice
> machine interfaces doesn't mean that you shouldn't also have something
> that is suitable for humans. qmp-shell is trying to be that, and while
> it leaves much to be desired in its current state, replacing it with
> even more machine-friendly stuff that is cumbersome for humans isn't the
> right answer.
> 
> Kevin
> 
> 
--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / address@hidden / Manchester, UK