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

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Message-ID: <4612B303.5000109@zytor.com>
Date:	Tue, 03 Apr 2007 13:03:15 -0700
From:	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>
To:	Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@...p.org>
CC:	Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>,
	Cornelia Huck <cornelia.huck@...ibm.com>,
	Andi Kleen <ak@...e.de>,
	Christian Borntraeger <borntrae@...ibm.com>,
	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:
> 
> Yes, and that's the core of the Xen netfront.  But is there really much
> code which can be shared between different hypervisors?  When you get
> down to it, all the real code is hypervisor-specific stuff for setting
> up ringbuffers and dealing with interrupts.  Like all the other network
> drivers.
> 

One thing, Jeremy, which I think is being a bit misleading here: you're 
focusing on big, performance-critical stuff.  Those things are going to 
be the ones which has the most win to implement in hypervisor-specific 
ways.  Although we can offer models for some hypervisors (and G-d knows 
there are enough implementations out there of virtual disk which are 
almost identical), they're clearly not going to be universal.

However, there are other things; console is some, or my original 
example, which was random number generation.  For those, the benefit of 
unification is proportionally greater, simply because the win of 
anything hypervisor-specific is much smaller.

	-hpa
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