Re: [Qemu-devel] converging around a single guest agent

[Alon Levy <alevy@redhat.com>]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 07:24:40PM +0200, Barak Azulay wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> One of the breakout sessions during the ovirt workshop [1] was about the guest 
> tools, and focused mainly on the ovirt-guest-agent [2]. 
> 
> One of the issues discussed there, was the various existing guest agents out 
> there, and the need to converge the efforts to a single agent that will serve 
> all. 
> 
> while 4 agents were mentioned (Matahari, vdagent, qemu-ga & ovirt-guest-agent) 
> during that discussion, we narrowed it down to 2 candidates:  
> 
> qemu-ga (aka virt-agent):
> -------------------------
> - Qemu specific - it was aimed for specific qemu needs (mainly quiesce guest 
> I/O)
> - Communicates directly with qemu  (not implemented yet) 
> - Supports ? 
> - So far linux only
> - written in C
> 
> Ovirt-guest-agent:
> ------------------
> - Has been around for a long time (~5 years) - considered stable
> - Started as rhevm specific but evolved a lot since then
> - Currently the only fully functional guest agent available for ovirt
> - Written in python 
> - Some VDI related sub components are written in C & C++
> - Supports a well defined list of message types / protocol [3]
> - Supports the folowing guest OSs
>   Linux: RHEL5, RHEL6 F15, F16(soon) 

Does it have a seperate system level and user level part in Linux? It
does in windows, right? This is a requirment for replacing
vdagent+vdservice and the linux spice-agent, they both need to be active
during login stage, and then launch a new session agent when the user is
logged in. This is true for both linux and windows, although we have
completely different code bases for them:

 http://cgit.freedesktop.org/spice/linux/vd_agent/
 http://cgit.freedesktop.org/spice/win32/vd_agent/

linux is C, windows is C++ btw.

>   Windows: xp, 2k3 (32/64), w7 (32/64), 2k8 (32/64/R2)
> 
>   
> The need to converge is obvious, and now that ovirt-guest-agent is opensourced 
> under the ovirt stack, and since it already produces value for enterprise 
> installations, and is cross platform, I offer to join hands around ovirt-
> guest-agent and formalize a single code base that will serve us all.
> 
> git @ git://gerrit.ovirt.org/ovirt-guest-agent
> 
> Thoughts ?
> 
> Thanks
> Barak Azulay
> 
> [1] http://www.ovirt.org/news-and-events/workshop
> [2] http://www.ovirt.org/wiki/File:Ovirt-guest-agent.odp
> [3] http://www.ovirt.org/wiki/Ovirt_guest_agent
>