Qt + Processes + I/O redirection

I had a look at QtEmu today, a Qt4 frontend for Qemu. The tool is really nice, however I missed an important feature: I would like to add arbitrary command line parameters for Qemu startup, because some of my requirements (serial I/O, disabling graphics support) are not met by typical frontends, because they are quite special.

I therefore added a new edit box to QtEmu enabling me to insert my parameters. However, nothing happened in my terminal and I wasn't able to see any output from Qemu. iMichael and I found out that the QProcess class used by QtEmu does send its standard input and output to its parent by default. The solution for output is easy: standard and error output streams can be redirected using the QProcess::setProcessChannel() method.

Redirecting input is a bit harder (but I needed it, because I'd like to interact with the Fiasco kernel debugger). There is no channel for writing to a QProcess in Qt4. However, some Trolltech developers already came up with a solution for interactive processes, which helped in our case, too.