[Qemu-devel] Qemu impressions

[ZIGLIO, Frediano, VF-IT]

Hi,
  this is my first mail in Qemu mailing list. I think it's a fantastic
program. I'm starting using it quite a lot at home (with Linux) and at
work (with Windows XP). Everything works quite well (nothing is
perfect).

I'm a developer but I'm quite busy at the moment. Recently I got it
compiling under windows but I don't know if I would be able to send some
patches so let me share some hints I got:
- under windows pressing system keys like win-R are not handled that
fine (well the workaround is just press win key again)
- under windows using dsound (SET QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=dsound) as sound driver
closing console window qemu crash. This not happen using "standard" sdl
driver (so I think problem reside in audio/dsoundaudio.c source)
- windows printf do not handle "%lld" format strings and similar (llx,
llo, llu) casing some problems (try "qemu-img info imagefile" command),
correct format for long long type is "I64" (so "%lld" should be
converted to "%I64d" under windows or replace any printf calls using a
standard printf)
- full kernel emulation on Windows XP seems to crash the system

Is someone working on qemu-img? I like very much the basefile idea,
usually I install a base system, wipe it in some way, compress with
"qemu-img convert ...", create a new image based on base system and than
work on this new image however is not possible to wipe and restrict
(even without compression) using "qemu-img convert ..." cause conversion
of a image based on another give a new not based image. I would also
useful a command to create an image based on another (something like a
"image diff") or creating a based image with different size (for example
having a first 3G image with a single 3G partition and another image
based on first with two partition with first 3G and second 6GB). Another
problem is porting image from windows to linux, image based have
basefile stored in it so is very difficult to move this type of image,
it would be fine having relative paths and/or some way to change base
filename.

bye
  freddy77