qemu.txt

Running Qemu on *nix OSes with Minoca OS as a guest:
I was able to get up and running with this command:
qemu-system-x86_64 -hda $SRCROOT/x86dbg/bin/pc.img -m 256 -vnc 0.0.0.0:0 -serial pty

When you run it qemu spits out something to the effect of:
char device redirected to /dev/pts/2

I was then able to connect the debugger with:
debug -k /dev/pts/2 -s $SRCROOT/$ARCH$VARIANT$DEBUG/bin

Although the debugger is a binary protocol, you can poke it manually to see if
it's alive by doing "cat /dev/pts/2" on one session, letting that sit, and
doing "echo ? > /dev/pts/2" on another. You should see an exclamation point
show up on the cat session, as ? and ! are our resynchronization protocol.

Qemu on Windows:
That's another story. The short version is to use the aliases and versions
checked in to https://gitlab.com/minoca/tools. Typing 'run' fires up a Qemu
instance, which presents no window until you type 'dx' to fire up the kernel
debugger which connects to the named pipe Qemu is waiting for.

Newer versions of Qemu on Windows seem to get into a livelock situation when
using a Named Pipe where serial data is written by the host but cannot yet be
read by the guest. It then spends all of its time in this loop and the VM stops
making progress. I created some patches to try and work around it, and it
worked okay on the ARM version. The x86 version had medium performance, if I
remember correctly, but didn't seem to be worth the upgrade from our blazing
fast 0.13 version.