Yes, you are right: sendkey does not send keys to the serial console. I had a chat with Peter last year about it in the IRC where the explained:
<danielhb> hey! quick question: is the 'sendkey' monitor command supposed to send the key presses to the serial console of the guest when running with -nographics ? The command works fine with VGA/VNC graphics but the serial console doesn't show the character key being sent by the command <pm215> no, 'sendkey' sends a key to whatever physical keyboard is currently being emulated, regardless of what is being done with serial devices <danielhb> pm215, I 've debugged the code and saw that the scancodes are being sent to the emulated keyboard via sendkey. I just wondered why the serial console doesn't show the keysyms but the VGA does <pm215> because keyboards don't plug into serial terminals <pm215> this is like having a server with a PC keyboard plugged into it and also a serial port which you're using as the serial terminal <pm215> pressing a key on the PC keyboard doesn't do anything to the serial terminal <danielhb> pm215, that makes sense, haven't thought of that. thanks! Given that the bug report was created around a wrong assumption, this should be closed. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1688231 Title: [Qemu-ppc] sendkey is not working for any of the keystrokes Status in QEMU: New Bug description: sendkey option is not working for any of the keystrokes in ppc64le, Qemu version: # qemu-img --version qemu-img version 2.9.50 (v2.9.0-303-g81b2d5c-dirty) Qemu command line: # qemu-system-ppc64 --enable-kvm --nographic -vga none -machine pseries -m 4G,slots=32,maxmem=32G -smp 16,maxcpus=32 -device virtio-blk-pci,drive=rootdisk -drive file=/var/lib/libvirt/images/f25-upstream-ppc64le.qcow2,if=none,cache=none,format=qcow2,id=rootdisk -monitor telnet:127.0.0.1:1234,server,nowait -net nic,model=virtio -net user -redir tcp:2000::22 Guest booted successfully and logged in Fedora 25 (Twenty Five) Kernel 4.11.0-rc4 on an ppc64le (hvc0) atest-guest login: updatedb (5582) used greatest stack depth: 9568 bytes left root Password: Last login: Mon Mar 27 01:57:51 on hvc0 [root@atest-guest ~]# Qemu monitor: # telnet 127.0.0.1 1234 Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to 127.0.0.1. Escape character is '^]'. QEMU 2.9.50 monitor - type 'help' for more information (qemu) sendkey a (qemu) sendkey ret But from the console, I couldn't observe the keystroke a or return. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1688231/+subscriptions