Re: [Qemu-devel] Transitioning from HMP to QMP for QEMU

[Kevin Wolf]

Am 15.12.2011 14:18, schrieb Jan Kiszka:
> On 2011-12-15 14:02, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>> What is the status of QEMU's transition from HMP to the QMP interface?
>>
>> My current understanding is that QEMU provides new HMP commands for
>> humans, but HMP is being phased out as an API.  Management tools
>> should rely only on QMP for new commands.  That would mean new HMP
>> commands are not guaranteed to produce backwards-compatible output
>> because tools are not supposed to parse the output.
>>
>> On the libvirt side, new QEMU features should only be supported via
>> the json monitor in the future (i.e. human monitor patches should not
>> be sent/merged)?  Existing HMP commands will still need the human
>> monitor support in order to handle old QEMU versions gracefully, but
>> I'm thinking about new commands only.
>>
>> Does everyone agree on this?  I think this is an important discussion
>> if we want our management interface to get better and more consistent
>> in the future.
> 
> To phase out the classic HMP implementation, we need an internal
> HMP-over-JSON wrapper (with tab expansion etc.) so that virtual console
> and gdbstub monitors continue to benefit from new commands. Those
> interfaces will stay for a long time, I'm sure.

I think we're not talking about dropping HMP here, only about how long
to support it as a stable API for management tools. I believe that we
have been in a transitional phase for long enough now that we can start
changing the output format of HMP commands without considering it an API
breakage.

Kevin