xemu/QMP/README
Jan Kiszka b40292e711 QMP: Introduce commands documentation
One of the most important missing feature in QMP today is its
supported commands documentation.

The plan is to make it part of self-description support, however
self-description is a big task we have been postponing for a
long time now and still don't know when it's going to be done.

In order not to compromise QMP adoption and make users' life easier,
this commit adds a simple text documentation which fully describes
all QMP supported commands.

This is not ideal for a number of reasons (harder to maintain,
text-only, etc) but does improve the current situation. To avoid at
least divering from the user monitor help and texi snippets, QMP bits
are also maintained inside qemu-monitor.hx, and hxtool is extended to
generate a single text file from them.

Signed-off-by: Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>
Signed-off-by: Luiz Capitulino <lcapitulino@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>
2010-06-01 13:48:43 -05:00

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QEMU Monitor Protocol
=====================
Introduction
-------------
The QEMU Monitor Protocol (QMP) allows applications to communicate with
QEMU's Monitor.
QMP is JSON[1] based and has the following features:
- Lightweight, text-based, easy to parse data format
- Asynchronous events support
- Stability
For more information, please, refer to the following files:
o qmp-spec.txt QEMU Monitor Protocol current specification
o qmp-commands.txt QMP supported commands
o qmp-events.txt List of available asynchronous events
There are also two simple Python scripts available:
o qmp-shell A shell
o vm-info Show some information about the Virtual Machine
[1] http://www.json.org
Usage
-----
To enable QMP, QEMU has to be started in "control mode". There are
two ways of doing this, the simplest one is using the the '-qmp'
command-line option.
For example:
$ qemu [...] -qmp tcp:localhost:4444,server
Will start QEMU in control mode, waiting for a client TCP connection
on localhost port 4444.
It is also possible to use the '-mon' command-line option to have
more complex combinations. Please, refer to the QEMU's manpage for
more information.
Simple Testing
--------------
To manually test QMP one can connect with telnet and issue commands:
$ telnet localhost 4444
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
{"QMP": {"version": {"qemu": "0.12.50", "package": ""}, "capabilities": []}}
{ "execute": "qmp_capabilities" }
{"return": {}}
{ "execute": "query-version" }
{"return": {"qemu": "0.12.50", "package": ""}}
Contact
-------
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/MonitorProtocol
Luiz Fernando N. Capitulino <lcapitulino@redhat.com>