[libvirt] [Qemu-devel] Re: Supporting hypervisor specific APIs in libvirt

[Alexander Graf]

On 24.03.2010, at 21:32, Anthony Liguori wrote:

> On 03/24/2010 03:12 PM, Luiz Capitulino wrote:
>> On Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:49:45 +0200
>> Avi Kivity<avi at redhat.com>  wrote:
>> 
>>   
>>> On 03/24/2010 06:42 PM, Luiz Capitulino wrote:
>>>     
>>>> On Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:42:16 +0200
>>>> Avi Kivity<avi at redhat.com>   wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>       
>>>>> So, at best qemud is a toy for people who are annoyed by libvirt.
>>>>> 
>>>>>         
>>>>   Is the reason for doing this in qemu because libvirt is annoying?
>>>>       
>>> Mostly.
>>> 
>>>     
>>>> I don't see
>>>> how adding yet another layer/daemon is going to improve ours and user's life
>>>> (the same applies for libqemu).
>>>> 
>>>>       
>>> libvirt becomes optional.
>>>     
>>  I think it should only be optional if all you want is to run a single VM
>> in this case what seems to be missing on our side is a _real_ GUI, bundled
>> with QEMU potentially written in a high-level language.
>>   
> 
> That's a separate problem.
> 
>>  Then we make virt-manager optional and this is good because we can sync
>> features way faster and we don't have to care about _managing_ several
>> VMs, our world in terms of usability and maintainability is about one VM.
>> 
>>  IMVHO, everything else should be done by third-party tools like libvirt,
>> we just provide the means for it.
>>   
> 
> We need to have a common management interface for third party tools.  libvirt cannot be that today because of the fact that it doesn't support all of our features.  What we need to figure out is how we can work with the libvirt team to fix this.

The feature problem isn't the only one. It's also about ease of use. I personally find the qemu command line easier to use than anything libvirt-derived.

> So far, a libqemu.so with a flexible transport that could be used directly by a libvirt user (ala cairo/gdk type interactions) seems like the best solution to me.

ACK.

One thing I was thinking is that it might be a good idea to split the qemu command line version off as well. The qemu backend would then only speak QMP with an empty device case and the actual "qemu" command would run that, connect to it via QMP and instanciate everything.

That way we'd get a consistent interface for management apps while keeping an easy to use CLI.


Alex