Hi all, this is my first post to the mailing list! I've spent the last couple weeks building QEMU Rust crates to enable a couple goals:
- Install QEMU binaries using cargo, the Rust package manager - Use git-latest QEMU binaries in Rust projects as a dependency - Write QEMU TCG plugins entirely in Rust The main crate is https://crates.io/crates/qemu, a thin wrapper around the existing QEMU build system, using crate features to toggle configure options. There are also crates for each binary build target, for example https://crates.io/crates/qemu-system-x86_64. These crates allow users to run `cargo install qemu-system-x86_64`, which installs a small wrapper binary with a dependency on the built binaries from the qemu crate. These binary installs run exactly as a normal QEMU installation via package manager would, and essentially just provide another alternative distro-agnostic packaging mechanism. More interesting (I think) is the crate https://github.com/novafacing/cannonball, which depends on the qemu crate and enables developers to write QEMU TCG plugins entirely in Rust. This enables a very nice workflow for Rust developers interested in building tracers, profilers, and other tooling already supported by the TCG Plugin API. The cannonball repository has one example of such a tracer that outputs various events as JSON. This is a pretty rough implementation I've hacked together over a week or two, but I've heard from IRC there is some interest in experimenting with Rust as part of QEMU and I'm interested in feedback on this attempt in that direction. There's a bit more information in my post about this on cohost: https://cohost.org/novafacing/post/240422-some-qemu-and-plugi Finally, I am acutely aware in doing this I've taken control of almost 70 crate names the QEMU project might like to use at some point. I'm not here to step on toes, so if the decision makers would like the QEMU project to get control of these crate names, just let me know and I'll email the crates.io team about getting them moved. Otherwise, comments, discussion about Rust-ifying QEMU and its plugins, ideas, and PRs welcome, as an author of a decent number of TCG plugins the last few years I'm pretty excited about what even this rudimentary approach has enabled with regards to ease of use and development speed. -Rowan
