This series adds a long-missing IRC character device driver to qemu. See patch 1 for an explanation why you should have been missing it.
To make it short: IRC is a very well tested and more reliable, social, human-friendly, and ubiquitous[1] communication interface than any of the other character devices qemu has to offer. "Social?", you ask? "Exactly!", I say. Again, see patch 1. "But why do we need 'social'?" Because what is it that separates qemu from the other well-known type-2 hypervisors? Besides simply being better (of course!), it is free software which is written by and maintained by a community. It is social. Now we need to capitalize on this very fact even further, not only embracing it in qemu development, but also in qemu usage. Already, everyone can work on the qemu project. In the future, everyone will be able to work with a qemu instance. This is what this patch series embodies. The future is now. What a time to be alive. Oh, and don't forget the reliability and ubiquity. Finally, there has been no encryption whatsoever in qemu's character devices so far. For IRC, SSL is a well-known and commonly implemented client-to-server encryption method (patch 3), and this series will furthermore introduce a widely used and easy to implement, yet secure enough even for military standards, end-to-end encryption (patch 4). [1] Google search for: - irc: 1.27e+8 results - tcp: 1.08e+8 results - udp: 6.28e+7 results - telnet: 2.29e+7 results - stdio: 9.04e+6 results - "unix sockets": 1.37e+5 results Max Reitz (5): chardev: Add IRC char driver chardev/irc: Add sockfd option chardev/irc: Add SSL support chardev/irc: Add end-to-end encryption Documentation: Document IRC char driver configure | 43 +++- qapi-schema.json | 32 +++ qemu-char.c | 714 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ qemu-options.hx | 28 +++ 4 files changed, 806 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-) -- 2.3.4