Re: [Qemu-devel] QEMU/KQEMU for server consolidation?

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi,

On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, Henrik Nordstrom wrote:

> On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, Leigh Dyer wrote:
> 
> > Has anyone tried something like this before? QEMU will be running on a
> > server, so I figured that the VNC X server would be a good option for the
> > GUI, but if anyone has a better idea I'd love to hear it.
> 
> You could also run VNC or RDP on the Windows server guest installation.
> Doesn't give you remote access to the early boot sequence but has slightly
> less overhead.

Uh, I tend to say that the overhead is bigger. If you run VNC on the guest 
installation, not only is the VNC layer *translated*, but you also have 
the downside of *translated* polling: remember that WinVNC has to look for 
changes on the screen itself. Xvnc gets told where the screen changes.

Alternatively, you could patch QEmu with the rfb patch, which speaks VNC 
natively.

The only problem with the rfb patch I can think of is the mouse. It is 
just not trivial to turn off mouse acceleration, which is a real pity.

In the last weeks, I tried to find a way to emulate a graphics tablet. 
Unfortunately, I was highly unsuccessful. First, I was not able to find 
enough documentation for any PS/2 graphics tablet.

So, I turned to serial tablets. I came so far as to add a virtual serial 
device which gets prompted by the driver for a response. But I could not 
figure out a satisfactory response. Evidently, the Win98 drivers always 
expect a certain firmware version as response, and refuse to activate 
graphics tablet support as a consequence.

Does anybody on this list have a (working) serial tablet? I'd like to know 
the activating response, so I can finally finish up the rfb patch.

Another possibility would be to write a virtual USB graphics tablet 
device.

Note that this would help non-RFB QEmu, too. You could (finally) use the 
mouse without grabbing (for some applications, like flight simulators, and 
certain keyboard shortcuts, you still would need to grab).

Ciao,
Dscho

P.S.: Unfortunately, I will not have much time to work on QEmu in the next 
weeks, so if you want to work on this, go wild. If you want my alpha code, 
I'll send it to you.