Hi, > We *could* do it that way, but it wouldn't look pretty. Instead of having > these menu items: > > VGA, Monitor, Serial, Parallel > > We would have these menu items: > > VGA > compat_monitor0 > serial0 > parallel0 > > They look very anti-pretty.
Those (except VGA) come from the chardev name. What you list here are simply the default names qemu applies. "Serial" and "serial0" are not that different actually, and attaching a number makes sense as you can have multiple serial lines. Try 'qemu -serial vc -serial vc' and you'll get another entry "serial1". With a more verbose syntax you can have custom names for your chardevs, try 'qemu -chardev vc,id=ttyS0 -device isa-serial,chardev=ttyS0". And IMO it makes sense to have the actual name of the chardev show up in the menu so you know for sure which is which. The 'compat_monitor0' is a bit ugly indeed, IIRC this used to be just 'monitor0' but that caused some backward compatibility issues so it got renamed this way as quick stopgap. When fixing that it would be good to do it in the common code so it is the same for all UIs (as Peter already sayed). cheers, Gerd