Re: [Qemu-devel] QEMU GUI

[Kevin F. Quinn]

On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 16:50:10 -0500
Anthony Liguori <address@hidden> wrote:

> Fabrice Bellard wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Concerning the QEMU GUI, my mind slightly evolved since my last
> > posts on the topic: I think that a wxWidgets GUI would be the best
> > as it is reasonnably portable and because it uses the native GUIs.
> 
> I think the first step is to validate whether wxWidgets will be 
> adequate.

Part of that should be to determine what the GUI will actually do; in
particular should it "wrap" the guest window, or should it be a
separate window for guest selection, configuration etc (which is my
preference).  The latter case should allow the guest window to remain
SDL, with the guest selection/configuration stuff in wxWidgets.

>  I've not used it myself but poked around the site a
> little. It appears there's a gl canvas which should be a reasonable
> place to start.  It seems like overkill for QEMU though.

At this point you're talking about embedding the Qemu guest window
directly into the wxWidgets GUI, yes?  I'm thinking the primitives that
the graphics driver in QEMU is emulating are not at the GL level, but
at the raw hardware level - I don't know how far apart these things
are, but I'd hazard that a GL canvas won't really help.

> Does anyone know a wxWidget which provides direct pixel access to 
> something that ends up being a XShmImage?  If they're canvas uses a 
> normal XImage performance is going to be pretty crappy.

I do think the ability to pass through accelerated graphics stuff from
the guest to the host should be a big factor.  I assume this is what
the cirrus emulation currently does through SDL, to some extent at
least. This issue would make or break guest graphics performance.

I'm ignorant of details, but from a vague hand-wavy distance it should
be simple enough to retain SDL for the emulation windows (and SDL does
seem to be the tool for the job there), with a separate wxWidgets
frontend GUI to manage the launch and visibility of emulation windows,
assist in guest creation etc.

Perhaps it's worth asking the WxWidgets people what they might suggest.

> Regards,
> 
> Anthony Liguori
> 
> > If someone is interested, I am ready to try to include such a GUI
> > in the QEMU repository even if it is not usable yet.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Fabrice.
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Kevin F. Quinn

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