Re: virtualGraphicCards

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

Mark Williamson wrote:

>The idea is that the graphical console will have "back/front" structure 
>similar to the other devices, with a viewer in dom0 reading screen data from 
>the guest and either displaying it, or exporting it over the network.
>
>The question here is: do we write a kernel framebuffer driver for this (and 
>get the X server to use that) or implement it in the X server directly?  I 
>think the former solution is probably going to have the best cost/benefit.
>  
>
I agreed with Mark up until very recently.  Doing some (unscientific) 
analysis of the cost of framebuffer rendering leads me to belief that 
it's not necessarily worth having a kernel framebuffer for para-virtual 
domains.

IMHO, a better solution would be to use Xvnc and have a terminal => VNC 
server (that could also proxy a VNC session).  Here's how I think it 
would look:

Every domain has a dedicated network interface for VNC.  Domains are 
configured with Xvnc with reverse VNC.  Each domain has a XenVNC 
instance running on dom0, the XenVNC daemon either 1) exposes the 
console via VNC (perhaps with ggiterm) or 2) proxies the domain's Xvnc 
session.

Depending on where the device model ends up, for full virtual domains 
you can just expose the VNC session from the device model directly or 
proxy it in dom0.

The real benefit with this approach is you do the VNC encoding in the X 
server (and can take advantage of all of that information) as opposed to 
rendering to a flat buffer and then trying to expose that buffer 
directly.  In fact, this is the only way to take advantage of the remote 
cursor pseudo-encodings in VNC which IMO has the most dramatic effect on 
VNC usability.

Just a thought.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>One thing that's important (IMHO) is not to require networking in order to get 
>the virtual display - makes it easier to install, configure stuff, etc via a 
>graphical interface.
>
>Cheers,
>Mark
>
>  
>
>>Do you mean how the virtual graphics card is "seen" by the dom0? Or/And
>>accessed?
>>
>>Imho, a glue-layer could abstract several approaches, for example 9P
>>(the Plan9-folks love it, I did not have the time to test it and thus I
>>don't have an opinion yet. However, I believe it is good ;-)) and VNC,
>>and the dom0 decides itsself howto access the "data" - this would be
>>pretty good because some OSes (which may be dom0-cabable some day) may
>>find method-N better (are optimized for it) than method-M... and so on
>>;-)
>>
>>
>>
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>>
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>