[libvirt] how to pass qemu options?

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Thu May 15 13:49:41 UTC 2008


On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 02:34:20PM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 
> > We explicitly do not support passing arbitrary arguments to QEMU.
> 
> Supporting and implementing are two different things IMHO.
>
> It is pretty clear that *supporting* such a configuration is impossible
> and that running it on production systems is a really bad idea for the
> reasons outlined.

We can say that all we like, but the reality is 'we ship it, we support it'.
Users are going to file bugs if things break & are going to want them fixed
In RHEL we ship Xen with SDL support for framebuffer, even though our tools
only 'support' VNC. We still have multiple bugs file against SDL and we have
to fix them. Users don't distinguish, they just use all the features you
provide them and expect them all to work.

> Nevertheless being able to pass random additional arguments to $emulator
> is required for any serious development work.  I *hate* to having to
> create a wrapper script each time I need to pass in additional
> parameters, and I'd *love* to see libvirt being a bit more developer
> friendly.

Historically we've not had very complete coverage of QEMU args, but we've
been adding alot of new functionality recently so the need for extra args
is reducing all the time. We recently added serial, parallel, sound and
drive support. USB is the next on the list at which point we basically 
have coverage of all the important options we should reasonably expect.
Creating wrapper scripts for experimentation is not that difficult.

Regards,
Daniel.
-- 
|: Red Hat, Engineering, Boston   -o-   http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org  -o-  http://virt-manager.org  -o-  http://ovirt.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: GnuPG: 7D3B9505  -o-  F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|




More information about the libvir-list mailing list