Re: Making QEMU easier for management tools and applications

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

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Il lun 27 gen 2020, 21:11 John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> ha scritto:

>
> > ./qemu-core <<EOF
> {
>     "machine": "Q35",
>     "memory": "2GiB",
>     "accel": "kvm"
> }
> EOF
>

And now you have to keep all the syntactic sugar that is in vl.c. I don't
think a redesign of -readconfig should accept anything less verbose than

- machine:
    type: q35
    ram:
       type: memory-backend-hostmem
       size: 2G
- accel:
  - type: kvm

And this is not even taking into account disks.

I like the idea of refactoring all the syntactic sugar into a pre-pass on
command line options. This is not an entirely new idea, see
https://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg35024.html.

I am afraid that this thread is derailing a bit, with lots of pipe dreams
and no actionable items. How do we get it back in track?

Paolo


> No file required, cooperates with readline, avoids crunchy,
> hard-to-maintain CLI syntax. Directly and easily translatable to a
> stored-file configuration. All configuration and documentation is
> centralized via QAPI.
>
> A little worse to type manually, yes. Maybe not bad /enough/ for me to
> want to rescue the CLI which prevents full QAPI-fication and a working
> configuration file.
>
> Arguably, a well documented configuration schema will be much easier to
> browse, discover, and use than a labyrinthine CLI with many stub
> definitions whose options are not exposed in the documentation.
>
> (The argument here is: It's a little harder and a little longer to type,
> but the benefits from the schema organization may improve productivity
> of using QEMU directly instead of harming it.)
>
> --js
>
>

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