> find the libvirt functionality and work backwards from it
This is a great suggestion, thanks.
> Almost all the docs are going into libvirt, and libvirt's (IMHO) terrible abstractions. The reality is that almost all the investment in qemu's user-facing capabilities are done via libvirt, so it makes sense.
Yeah it's unfortunate that not many people seem to use QEMU directly. I can't use libvirt for my project because a) I'm targeting windows and b) libvirt seems to assume that it will run with root privileges, and I'm targeting userspace.
Honestly other than a few things like CPU pinning, I haven't seen much to justify libvirt over plain QEMU. This would be especially true if the QEMU CLI was simplified slightly and better documented.
CPU pinning is something I'd really like to see in plain QEMU as well. Another is some equivalent to the pre- and post- hooks that libvirt supports, though I can get around this with a bash script.
Yah I had some similar constraints, also I just didn't want to bring the entire mess of libvirt into my project's life.
> This would be especially true if the QEMU CLI was simplified slightly and better documented.
I think this is the biggest issue. I can't complain because I haven't helped fix it, but the command line flag explosion, coupled with the qemu -readconfig/-writeconfig sucking is a big reason people just check out mentally and write big XML descriptions of their VMs.
This is a great suggestion, thanks.
> Almost all the docs are going into libvirt, and libvirt's (IMHO) terrible abstractions. The reality is that almost all the investment in qemu's user-facing capabilities are done via libvirt, so it makes sense.
Yeah it's unfortunate that not many people seem to use QEMU directly. I can't use libvirt for my project because a) I'm targeting windows and b) libvirt seems to assume that it will run with root privileges, and I'm targeting userspace.
Honestly other than a few things like CPU pinning, I haven't seen much to justify libvirt over plain QEMU. This would be especially true if the QEMU CLI was simplified slightly and better documented.