linux-kernel - Re: A set of "standard" virtual devices?

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Message-ID: <46117B62.9030902@us.ibm.com>
Date:	Mon, 02 Apr 2007 16:53:38 -0500
From:	Anthony Liguori <aliguori@...ibm.com>
To:	Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@...p.org>
CC:	Andi Kleen <ak@...e.de>,
	Virtualization Mailing List <virtualization@...ts.osdl.org>,
	Jeff Garzik <jeff@...zik.org>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	mathiasen@...il.com, virtualization@...ts.linux-foundation.org
Subject: Re: A set of "standard" virtual devices?

Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> Andi Kleen wrote:
>> The implementation wouldn't need to use PCI at all. There wouldn't 
>> even need to be PCI like registers internally. Just a pci device
>> with an ID somewhere in sysfs. PCI with unique IDs
>> is just a convenient and well established key into the driver module
>> collection. Once you have the right driver it can do what it wants.
> 
> But I understood hpa's suggestion to mean that there would be a standard
> PCI interface for a hardware RNG, and a single linux driver for that
> device, which all hypervisors would be expected to implement.  But
> that's only reasonable if the virtualization environment has some notion
> of PCI to expose to the Linux guest.

The actual PCI bus could paravirtualized.  It's just a question of 
whether one reinvents a device discovery mechanism (like XenBus) or 
whether one piggy backs on existing mechanisms.

Furthermore, in the future, I strongly suspect that HVM will become much 
more important for Xen than PV and since that already has a PCI bus it's 
not really that big of a deal.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>     J

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