[Qemu-devel] FEATURE REQUESTS: multiple smb folders and compressed vm file support

[Stealth Dave]

I have a couple of feature requests that should be fairly simple for an 
experienced C developer to implement:

First, allowing multiple folder support for built-in smb.  By adding 
parameters and formatting to the -smb attribute, the command-line could 
be parsed to allow multiple folders to be supported in qemu:

# qemu hd.img -smb /home/user:home,/mnt/usbdrive:flashdrive

By using commas to delineate each share and a colon to separate the 
path from the share name, you can easily allow a nearly unlimited 
number of smb shares.  In the above example, the folder "/home/user" 
would be available a smb share "home" and "/mnt/usbdrive" would be 
"flashdrive".  The resulting smbd.conf generated would look something 
like this:

[global]
private dir=/tmp/qemu-smb.903
smb ports=0
socket address=127.0.0.1
pid directory=/tmp/qemu-smb.903
lock directory=/tmp/qemu-smb.903
log file=/tmp/qemu-smb.903/log.smbd
smb passwd file=/tmp/qemu-smb.903/smbpasswd
security = share
[home]
path=/home/user
read only=no
guest ok=yes
[flashdrive]
path=/mnt/usbdrive
read only=no
guest ok=yes

If no ":" is found, it can default to "qemu" to provide simple 
backwards compatibility.  It's just a matter of parsing, which is 
beyond my level of C programming.  If QEMU were written in PHP, we'd be 
golden! ;)

The second request may be a little trickier, but probably not too much. 
 The memory dump created by savevm is the same size as the amount of 
memory used by QEMU for virtual memory.  Since this is only loaded 
once, wouldn't it make since to compress this file to save space?  
Perhaps using zlib or some other portable library that could easily be 
included in QEMU?  It should be trivial to perform a check for a 
compressed vm image for backwards compatibility.

I hope someone will find it in their heart to work on these at some 
point.  The former specifically would be helpful for a small project 
that I am working on, but I think that they are also of general 
usefulness.

Thanks,
- Dave