[Qemu-devel] converging around a single guest agent

[Barak Azulay <bazulay@redhat.com>]

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) 
  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