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

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Message-ID: <46117F72.6020506@zytor.com>
Date:	Mon, 02 Apr 2007 15:10:58 -0700
From:	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>
To:	Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@...p.org>
CC:	Andi Kleen <ak@...e.de>, Jeff Garzik <jeff@...zik.org>,
	virtualization@...ts.linux-foundation.org,
	Virtualization Mailing List <virtualization@...ts.osdl.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	mathiasen@...il.com
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.
> 

That is, of course, true, although "some notion of" is very broad, and 
one could also use this for detection and some hypervisor-specific 
communication for the actual I/O.

However, one probably wants to think about what the heck one actually 
means with "virtualization" in the absence of a lot of this stuff.  PCI 
is probably the closest thing we have to a lowest common denominator for 
device detection.

	-hpa
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