Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/2] Tunnel character device data over VNC (v1)

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 06:42:31PM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>   Hi,
> 
> > The key requirement here is that it should not
> >be neccessary to specifically configure each character device to make
> >it available via VNC.  The admin should be able to configure the char
> >devices with all current available backends (file, pty, null, tcp, udp,
> >unix, etc), and regardless of this config be able to snoop on data from
> >any active VNC client on demand.
> 
> Hmm.  What is the reason to handle vnc different from 
> unix/tcp/pty/whatever?  I would expect something like '-serial 
> vnc,name=foo' here ...

As I tried to explain, I want to be able to configure the serial devices 
using the existing backends *AND* also have the ability to occassionally 
access the data using a VNC client. VNC is not intended to be the main
character device backend here - it is just a way to snooping on the data
being sent to another backend. For the same reason, audio capture over
VNC does not impact the way you configure sound cards to use SDL/pulseaudio
alsa/esd/etc, it just gives you the means to capture the audio data  when
connected with VNC.

You could also envision QEMU getting the ability to add/remove display
backends like SDL/VNC on the fly. Thus VNC might not even be configured
when starting up the guest and specifying character device backend
configs. The capture approach deals with that problem trivially.

Daniel
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