Host filesystem for Qemu

I hacked together a simple host filesystem for Qemu this afternoon using fuse. This now becomes yet another project on my plate that needs cleanup and working through the submission process.

I use Qemu a lot and have some fancy scripts to automatically build disk images based on directories so I can easily test Xen and such. Of course, it's a real pain for things like Xend testing b/c I cannot just simply make a quick source code change and test again.

Even this it's a very primative hostfs (read only, single user), it's actually more than enough for what I need. I have to get my new webserver in line so I can make this stuff visible.

Touchscreen Emulation

Today I implemented emulation for the Wacom Touchpad. The idea behind implementing this was that many remote display protocols wish to deal with the mouse in absolute coordinates whereas PS/2 mice report in relative coordinates. Stephen Tweedie had the brillant idea at the recent XenSummit of just emulating a Touchscreen instead of a PS/2 mouse which solves this problem since Touchpads use absolute coordinates.

After milling around, I finally got around to it today. All in all, it took a few hours going from zero knowledge to a functional emulated Wacom device. Having an X driver really helped. I talked a bit to some folks in IRC about how to expose it in QEmu so now I just have to throw a patch together.

Without the source for X, this would have easily taken me a couple weeks to do...

More framebuffer goodness

Well, for starters, I've reach 100% pass rate with xm-test for the Xend XML/RPC code so I can take a break from that for a little bit while Xen settles down after the huge HVM merge. This leaves some time to work on the framebuffer again.

I talked to Ian for some time today about the framebuffer and in what form it should be merge. Ian has a very valid concern that we don't introduce things that are immediately deprecated (seeing something like the Cirrus FB emulated by the device model as a prime example of this). I think we were able to reach an agreement that as long as the framebuffer can provide good VNC performance (this means ARGB cursor, copy operations, etc.) it's good for quite a while (5 year time frame).

It was quite productive although a bit draining.