Re: [Qemu-devel] How are we looking for a release?

[Alexander Graf]

On 01.03.2009, at 18:41, Andreas Färber <address@hidden> wrote:

> Am 27.02.2009 um 19:55 schrieb Anthony Liguori:
>
> > The current cocoa implementation is extremely difficult to  
> > maintain.  I'd really like to see it deprecated in favor of SDL
>
> I understand that it is difficult to maintain for someone not  
> running OSX, and I am okay with fixing it ourselves like in this  
> case. Didn't you propose to add a native Gtk+ frontend yourself?

I don't see any issues with keeping it in the tree, as long as there  
are contributors fixing it, which is currently the case.

I could understand if you were thinking of dropping it because nobody  
cares, but please don't drop code just because.

> > ([...] 64-bit OS X--but does that even exist today?).
>
> It does exist, and I'm running on it. Mac OS X v10.4 had 64-bit  
> support for non-graphical apps, v10.5 added Cocoa support.
>
> SDL 1.2.13 is a ppc+i386 Universal Binary only. It is a Mach-O  
> Framework and does not include an sdl-config tool, so it is not  
> detected by QEMU's configure. You would use it through -framework  
> SDL rather than `sdl-config --libs`. I have no further knowledge  
> about SDL on Mac OS X other than that it was not installed on my  
> system. But in order to extend QEMU to a real graphical frontend the  
> choice is certainly the native Cocoa API.

It's even worse than that. I have a working SDL compilation on my Mac  
that runs for 32 bit target mode. But as far as I'm aware of it, there  
is no x86_64 SDL available, because Apple dropped some APIs in 64 bit  
mode.

So while you could theoretically build qemu with SDL on osx-i386,  
there is no way you could on osx-x86_64 atm.

> Originally I was using Q, a Cocoa frontend patched into QEMU 0.9.0  
> CVS. Shortly after we updated it for 0.9.1, they reorganized the  
> project for Q2 and imported some version of QEMU into their SVN  
> tree, decoupling Q from QEMU SVN trunk. Development seems to have  
> stalled since then.
> So currently, QEMU's basic Cocoa frontend is the only way to use a  
> graphical QEMU on Mac OS X to my knowledge.

With the recent vnc enhancements it might make sense to write a ui app  
decoupled from qemu that does basically what libvirt/virtman does.

But I'm not exactly a UI developer, so I'll leave the fun to you :).

Alex