[Qemu-devel] Problem Running QEMU, and passing new commands

[Shane Brennan]

Hi,
    I have successfully integrated the statistical simulation package SimPoint with QEMU. Now I wish to add some commands to QEMU so a user can start or stop simulation. The goal is that at the QEMU command prompt, the user could enter a command like start_simpoint or stop_simpoint. For example:

(qemu) start_simpoint
SimPoint started!
(qemu) 
.... /*Time passes.. */
(qemu) stop_simpoint
SimPoint stopped!

I am curious where I would edit QEMU to look for such commands, some point in the code where I can see what command is passed to QEMU, and do something such as
"if strcmp(command, "start_simpoint") == 0"

Also, there is another problem, I am able to run QEMU if I tell it to load and boot a linux image. But I am not able to simply boot up to the (qemu) prompt and enter commands from there. I try running QEMU using the following commands:
qemu-img create -f qcow c.img 3G
./i386-softmmu/qemu -hda c.img -L ./pc-bios/ -nographic

and it loads up to the (qemu) prompt. However, at that point everything freezes. I am running QEMU on a linux host with a dual 64-bit AMD processors, and doing this over an SSH connection.

If anyone has any advice on how I can get QEMU to boot to the point where I can enter commands, and how I can monitor these commands within the source code, I would very much appreciate the assistance.

~Shane Brennan
UC Santa Cruz