linux-kernel - Re: [RFC] Unify KVM kernel-space and user-space code into a single project

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Message-ID: <20100322142008.GE1940@8bytes.org>
Date:	Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:20:08 +0100
From:	oerg Roedel <joro@...tes.org>
To:	"Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones@...hat.com>
Cc:	"Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@...hat.com>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
	Pekka Enberg <penberg@...helsinki.fi>,
	Avi Kivity <avi@...hat.com>,
	Antoine Martin <antoine@...afix.co.uk>,
	Olivier Galibert <galibert@...ox.com>,
	Anthony Liguori <anthony@...emonkey.ws>,
	"Zhang, Yanmin" <yanmin_zhang@...ux.intel.com>,
	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
	Sheng Yang <sheng@...ux.intel.com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, kvm@...r.kernel.org,
	Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@...hat.com>,
	Jes Sorensen <Jes.Sorensen@...hat.com>,
	Gleb Natapov <gleb@...hat.com>,
	Zachary Amsden <zamsden@...hat.com>, ziteng.huang@...el.com,
	Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@...hat.com>,
	Fr?d?ric Weisbecker <fweisbec@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC] Unify KVM kernel-space and user-space code into a single
	project

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 01:23:26PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 01:05:13PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > This is close to the way libguestfs already works. It boots QEMU/KVM pointing
> > to a minimal stripped down appliance linux OS image, containing a small agent
> > it talks to over some form of vmchannel/serial/virtio-serial device. Thus the
> > kernel in the appliance it runs is the only thing that needs to know about the
> > filesystem/lvm/dm on-disk formats - libguestfs definitely does not want to be
> > duplicating this detailed knowledge of on disk format itself. It is doing
> > full read-write access to the guest filesystem in offline mode - one of the
> > major use cases is disaster recovery from a unbootable guest OS image.
> 
> As Dan said, the 'daemon' part is separate and could be run as a
> standard part of a guest install, talking over vmchannel to the host.
> The only real issue I can see is adding access control to the daemon
> (currently it doesn't need it and doesn't do any).  Doing it this way
> you'd be leveraging the ~250,000 lines of existing libguestfs code,
> bindings in multiple languages, tools etc.

I think we don't need per-guest-file access control. Probably we could
apply the image-file permissions to all guestfs files. This would cover
the usecases:

	* perf for reading symbol information (needs ro-access only
	  anyway)
	* Desktop like host<->guest file copy

I have not looked into libguestfs yet but I guess this approach is
easier to achieve.

	Joerg

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