Re: issues with Qemu output in terminal

[James Miller]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2022, Peter Maydell wrote:

> '-nographic' just tells QEMU to emulate a machine with no graphics
> and with a serial terminal connected to your terminal window. It
> doesn't (and cannot) do anything to ensure that the software
> running on the machine is actually going to send text output to
> the serial terminal. This is like real hardware -- you can take
> a PC, and unplug the monitor, and connect a serial cable from the
> PC's serial port to a serial terminal. But unless the OS you're
> booting on the PC knows about the serial port, it will just try to
> display its output on the monitor that's not plugged in, and the
> serial terminal will not display anything.

Thanks for your reply, Peter. Yeah, I kinda figured the man page might be 
oversimplifying a bit and that some further behind-the-scenes plumbing 
might be required. That's why I suggested that perhaps the terminal I'm 
using was not being detected as a console. Short of reconfiguring the 
guest OS for something more like actual terminal output through the serial 
port, is there a way to get a better display using the current -display 
curses -vga virtio method? Like, one that takes up more than about 50% of 
the terminal window? I suppose what's happening is that some emulated vga 
hardware is displaying shell input/output at a low resolution (640x480?) 
in my terminal, right?

I've had some better success trying to accomplish my aim using Docker, at 
least so far as getting an interactive shell from the guest OS that 
displays fine in my ssh/tmux session. But I had a fair amount of 
experience in former years (maybe 15 years ago?) with setting up guest 
OS's under Qemu, so I wanted to give it a shot as well.