RE: [Qemu-devel] Connecting to serial console via Telnet - possib le ?

[Armistead, Jason]

On Tuesday, 4 July 2006 4:06 PM, John R. Hogerhuis wrote:

>On Mon, 2006-07-03 at 03:03 -0400, Armistead, Jason wrote:
>> Hi
>> 
>> With SIMH, the VAX / PDP / nostalgic mini/mainframe emulator
>> (http://simh.trailing-edge.com/) the console port on the emulated system
is
>> directed to a TCP/IP port, so that you can simply Telnet into it.  Once
the
>> connection is established, then the SIMH emulator starts working.  This
>> suits SIMH nicely since many of its hosts want a VT100-ish console
terminal
>> anyhow, which is nicely emulated by many Telnet clients, and it saves
SIMH
>> having to do any keyboard conversion, host output decoding and screen
>> output, etc.
>
>Well QEMU can redirect the serial port to a character device. I guess if
>you redirected it to a pty then you just use socat to bridge the pty to
>a tcp connection, telnet or whatever.

That might be OK for the Unix/Linux people out there, but it's absolutely
useless for Windows users (running QEMU on a Windows host), for whom socat,
ptys and character devices are mostly meaningless concepts (unless you have
some sort of Unix/Linux background).

I'm trying to promote a more universally usable method in connecting via
Telnet to the serial port - it works nicely for SIMH whether it's using a
VMS, PC or Unix platform as a host. Even Microsoft decided that Telnet was
worth having !  It would also be useful for anyone wanting to port QEMU to
other O/S environments that do not have a Unix-style runtime environment,
device files, etc.  Almost anything that supports TCP/IP can offer up a port
for a Telnet connection, including many embedded environments.  Today,
QEMU's guest machine implementations are mainly Unix-style environments
based around workstation / PC / Pocket PC hardware platforms.  One day, QEMU
might also be a great dynamic translation / emulation environment for some
more esoteric embedded devices, maybe along similar lines to MAME / MESS,
and it might be running on more scaled-down host platforms rather than
multi-GHz PCs with 512Mb or more of RAM.  How about QEMU hosted on PS2/PS3,
Xbox or PSP ?  OK, so maybe I exagerate, but you get the idea !

Cheers

Jason