[virt-tools-list] Suggestions about Virt-manager

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 09:31:52AM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:
> 
> Yeah, we definitely need to provide a 'real' fullscreen mode.

I've been wondering about this too. I looked at totem for ideas. With
its fullscreen mode, it hides everything, but when you move the mouse
it displays a popup allowing you to un-fullscreen. Fine for a movie
player where you never move a mouse, but not useful for VNC.

Adding a magic hotkey is what things like TightVNC client do, but then
you have the perenial problem of hotkey clashing with one you want in
the guest.

Another option is to require you to move the mouse to a corner of the
screen, at which time displays a button to unfullscreen. Also sucks
becasue the same hot-zone corner might be used in guest - eg compiz
window tiling.

It all sucks. Suggestions on a postcard....

> no shared folder (I know SAMBA can share files between guest & host
> OS, but most of users don't know how);
> 
> Good idea, just not sure how to easily handle it in a hypervisor
> agnostic manner, and for regular users. I know qemu/kvm supports a
> simple samba mode, but I think it's an ugly hack (and libvirt doesn't
> support it).

libvirt  has a generic <filesystem> tag, but we only use that in LXC
and OpenVZ. I'd love to  see QEMU get a proper filesystem passthrough
option so we can leverage this. The Plan9fs patches were the only serious
contender for support in QEMU, but that doesn't seem to be actively
pushed. The samba stuff is a gross hack and not something we'd want
to support. You'd be better off just running samba manually in the
host and exporting to the guest.

>  no utility / seamless feature (lots of virtualbox / vmware users really
> love that feature!);
> 
> This is a cool feature, but I think would require a lot of work at the
> hypervisor level (and possibly special tools inside the guest? not
> sure), so certainly won't happen in the short term.

Seemless isn't something you need todo at the host level AFAIK, its all
guest magic. In the windows case you just have to make sure your guest
is configured with RDP support suitably.

Daniel
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