Features/IntegratedCopyPaste

Summary

Users have come to expect copy-paste between host and guest to work. This is also called clipboard sharing and makes it easier to work with graphical guests.

Details

We need session-level agents that need to talk to the host front-ends to do the clipboard synchronization. We also know that at some point, multiple session-level agents should be supported for multiple users/display servers. qemu-ga will have all the logic to proxy requests from these session-level agents up to the host via a shared virtio-serial channel.

So the overall work has been splitted into two parts:

1. Developing an initial session-level agent for clipboard synchronization
2. Handling communication between session-level agents and qemu-ga

Session-level clipboard synchronization agent

A per-session guest agent is needed to listen X11 PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections [0]. This agent will register to the GTK events related to those X11 selections and relay them to the session-level multiplexer probably using JSON. This is for the guest->host direction. The other direction will be supported as well.

Owner

• Name: Ozan Çağlayan
• Email: ozancag@gmail.com

Communication between session-level agents and qemu-ga

A qemu-ga software needs to be installed in the guest system for this to work. Whenever a new session is initiated for a guest, a session specific process would start in the guest, which will talk to the qemu-ga service via a unix socket which in turn will communicate with the hypervisor on the host via a virtio-serial socket to transfer the content between the guest and the host.

Owner

• Name: Pallav Agrawal
• Email: agr.pallav@gmail.com

References

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_selection

Status

• Ozan

A preliminary prototype is available at: https://github.com/ozancaglayan/qemu-copy-paste

• Pallav

Track my progress here