Re: How console data travel in Xen?

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

NAHieu wrote:

>Anthony, thank you for a great detail explaination. These information
>is really helpful to me.
>  
>
no problem :-)

>But still few questions stand: how do console data go from HW to Xen,
>then to dom0? (the above explaination is only about sessions between
>dom0 and domU)
>  
>
Ok, so let's say you enter some keyboard data.  Those keyboard actions 
are going to go to dom0.  If you're typing at a console it's getting 
intercepted by some program that's push that keyboard data to Xend let's 
say.  Xend takes that data and splits it up into CMSG_CONSOLE messages 
which it then passes through the previously described mechanism to domU.

Then domU sees that data as input on a virtual serial device (the domU 
kernel's been hacked to use the serial device by default instead of the 
typical virtual terminals).  Then when domU decides it wants to display 
that data back to the user, it sends it back to dom0 again through the 
previously described channel.

Xend ends up getting those messages and assembles it into a string which 
it then displays back on the console.

This is probably a bit clearer if you look at the VM-Tools source tree.  
Everything is pretty much confined to tools/vm-console.c and 
xenctld/console.c.  Xend does pretty much the same thing but there's a 
bit more indirection involved.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>Thank you a lot,
>Hieu
>
>  
>