Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] opengl rendering in the sdl window

[Andreas Färber]

Am 04.09.2008 um 05:00 schrieb Anthony Liguori:

> Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> > -makes the window resizing possible and hardware accelerated, thus  
> > very
> > efficient and smooth;
>
> This is neat, but, I'm unsure if the right way to support OpenGL is  
> through SDL.  For instance, there were Cocoa OpenGL patches posted a  
> bit ago that would be largely similar.  It may make more sense to  
> have an OpenGL front-end that has conditional code for SDL/Cocoa/X/ 
> etc.
>
> Then again, I've been kicking around the idea of doing a GTK front- 
> end.  An obvious thing to do here would be a glext based OpenGL  
> version (as we do in gtk-vnc).
>
> I think we need to have some discussion about what the long term  
> front-end should be for QEMU.  Otherwise, we're going to end up with  
> a proliferation of front-ends.  Personally, I'd rather move from SDL  
> to GTK so that we can build a proper user interface.

Anthony, you are aware of the Gtk+ QEMU Launcher?
https://gna.org/projects/qemulaunch/

Haven't used it personally but it's installed on all our Fedora lab  
machines.

In general I thought fancy ("proper") graphical frontends were left to  
the famous Management Applications. But I agree it could be useful to  
rethink the relation of QEMU to such secondary projects. I remember  
seeing the issue in Q that some parts of QEMU assume readability of  
stderr (e.g., when assigning more RAM than the default sparc machine  
allows), which is unhandy for a graphical app launched from the OS X  
Dock or GNOME menu. Having a clear set of macros/functions that can  
and should be overwritten by frontends (a separate header file that  
can be exchanged instead of constantly breaking patches) might help.  
In general maybe also a solution similar in spirit to Glauber's QEMU  
Accel tree might be useful. Q has a patch in their tree for instance  
that hooks into IDE to display disk activity. Food for thought.

Andreas