Documentation/QMP
QEMU Monitor Protocol
The QEMU Monitor Protocol (QMP) is a JSON-based protocol which allows applications to communicate with QEMU's Monitor the right way.
QMP's main features are:
- Lightweight, text-based, easy to parse data format
- Asynchronous messages support (ie. events)
- Capabilities negotiation
- API/ABI stability guarantees
Please, check the README file for more information.
General Status
A supported version of QMP is available since QEMU 0.13 (and a "feature preview" version in QEMU 0.12), however several commands in the current API have badly defined semantics.
This means that we will be introducing a deprecation policy soon. Users should always check QMP documentation as soon as a new release of QEMU is out, so that they don't run in the risk of using a deprecated command which may be removed in a future release.
Examples
In the following examples, 'C' stands for 'Client' and 'S' stands for 'Server'.
Server Greeting
S: { "QMP": { "version": { "qemu": "0.12.50", "package": "" }, "capabilities": [] } }
Query version
C: { "execute": "query-version" }
S: { "return": { "qemu": "0.12.50", "package": ""} }
Eject a device
C: { "execute": "eject", "arguments": { "device": "ide1-cd0" } }
S: {"return": {}}
Development
Main developers are Luiz Capitulino and Markus Armbruster, but all QMP-related discussions happen on the qemu-devel mailing list.
Next features, hot fixes and other patches are stored in the QMP unstable repository:
http://repo.or.cz/w/qemu/qmp-unstable.git
NOTE: all branches in this repository are constantly rebased (master inclusive).