Re: merge GGI support? [was: Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] CRIS target port]

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi,

On 02/10/2007, Anthony Liguori <address@hidden> wrote:
> Bernhard Fischer wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 03:09:41PM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> >
> >> Bernhard Fischer wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 01:45:39PM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> What does one gain with GGI support?  I've never seen a good answer to
> >>>> this.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>> GGI supports a number of display-targets:
> >>> http://www.ggi-project.org/targets.html
> >>> umong them X11, quartz, directx, fbdev, vgl, vnc, wsfb, libaa,
> >>> terminfo, cocoa, etc.
> >>>
> >>>
> >> SDL has a GGI backend.  So you can already use GGI with QEMU.
> >>
> >> So, what does it buy to have QEMU use GGI directly?
> >>
> >
> > Well, I don't have SDL. What did it buy to add VNC support and cocoa
> > support when there was already GGI support and GGI has backends for VNC
> > and cocoa? ;)
> >
>
> I can't comment about cocoa but the GGI support for VNC isn't very
> good.  Plus, I wanted to add new VNC extensions for virtualization.

I think it's the same way with other back-ends - you can do more
things if you talk to them directly instead of through SDL.

>
> If the only argument for adding GGI is so that you don't have to install
> libsdl, then does that mean that we should have an X11, fbdev, etc.
> backend for people who don't have GGI installed?

I think a GGI back-end would be useful.

I wouldn't mind also having other back-ends even if SDL supports them
(e.g. there's an Xlib patch for qemu, it is very little code compared
to vnc.c which you could say duplicates code already present in
libraries). The situation is the same with audio backends: there's
oss, alsa and SDL which can do both oss and alsa but works poorly.

Unrelated to this discussion on slow links VNC is much more usable
with the Xlib patch and Xvnc than through the built-in VNC (I think it
makes a better decision on what format to use based on the connection
speed).
Regards,
Andrew