Re: [PATCH] VM-Tool: C-based Xen management tools

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>]

Mark Williamson wrote:

>Nice work!
>  
>
Thanks :-)

>As far as making the interface intuitive...  I think it's reasonably sane to 
>specify this stuff the way the current tools do, although arguably it would 
>be useful to have some sort of abstraction so that users don't have to think 
>about PCI config space / USB port IDs.
>  
>
Yes, PCI wouldn't be too hard to abstract.  Abstracting USB worries me a 
bit though.  On the one hand, you want to abstract at the device level.  
However, not all USB devices make it easy to be uniquely identified (too 
much optional information).  This is a problem the devfs/udev guys have 
faced.

It's even hairer with virtualization though.  Say you had two harddrives 
that were USB and not uniquely identifiable.  You want to assign each 
harddrive to a separate VM.  If you unplug them and swap ports, and 
you're using the old configurations, you really want that each VM to see 
the harddrive they previously saw.  Swapping them could lead to 
confusion and even worse, security problems.

Not sure the best solution here.  One of the reasons I've held off on USB.

Regards,

>Cheers,
>Mark
>
>  
>
>>>So there will be no effort to backport, correct?
>>>      
>>>
>>That depends on demand.  The tools could be modified to open the
>>controls channels directly instead of going through xcs, but I'd rather
>>encourage an xcs based world where Xend and vm-tools can live together.
>>Of course, if someone was willing to backport the old Xend to xcs... :-)
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Anthony Liguori
>>    
>>



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