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Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: Host <-> guest interface port?


From: Fabrice Bellard
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: Host <-> guest interface port?
Date: Wed, 05 May 2004 20:31:09 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624


I would prefer a network based solution first. Changing the interface to use a CPU specific hack won't be difficult in the future.

Fabrice.

Matthew Mastracci wrote:
Fabrice Bellard wrote:

Matthew Mastracci wrote:

Would it be possible to add a host/guest interface port, akin to how VMWare handles this? It's a convenient way to get/set various properties from the host while running the guest operating system. This also allows a smoother mouse interface - ie: auto capture/release of the mouse as it hits the screen boundaries, clipboard synchronization as well as synchronization of the guest's clock with the host's.

Some more info on the VMWare port is here:
http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/backdoor.html



Of course it is possible to add that, but first we must define the features we want and implement the necessary support in the guest OSes, which seems to be the most difficult AFAIK. Clipboard support would be interesting. Does anyone know how to implement it for Linux and Windows guests ?

I can implement text-clipboard-passing for a windows guest without much effort. If the CPU protection for the IO port is disabled, even when running at IOPL3, it could be implemented entirely in userspace.

It would be nice to define standard register values for the different features, as well as add functionality to query the availability of the feature. For instance, the first two registers could define the supported interface:

Register 0: Returns the maximum supported register index by the current version of QEMU Register 1: Write to the register with a given register index - returns 1 if supported or 0 if unsupported or disabled.

Possible register functionality (off the top of my head):
- Get host clock: returns the host clock time in UTC (useful for clock sync between guest/host)
- Get host clock TZ: returns the host clock offset relative to UTC
- Set host's clipboard
- Get host's clipboard
- Attach/detach virtual device (floppy/cd/etc)
- Transfer file (?)
- Read guest filesystem





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