[Qemu-devel] Re: [RFC][PATCH 00/10] virtagent: host/guest RPC communication agent

[Michael Roth <mdroth@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On 10/23/2010 06:31 AM, Andrew Beekhof wrote:
> On 10/22/2010 08:45 PM, Michael Roth wrote:
>> This set of patches is meant to be applied on top of the Virtproxy v1
>> patchset.
>>
>> OVERVIEW:
>>
>> There are a wide range of use cases motivating the need for a guest
>> agent of some sort to extend the functionality/usability/control
>> offered by QEMU. Some examples include graceful guest shutdown/reboot
>> and notifications thereof, copy/paste syncing between host/guest,
>> guest statistics gathering, file access, etc.
>>
>> Ideally these would all be served by a single, easilly extensible
>> agent that can be deployed in a wide range of guests. Virtagent is an
>> XMLRPC server integrated into the Virtproxy guest daemon and aimed at
>> providing this type of functionality.
>>
>> This code is very rough, and I'll to document most of the
>> bugs/shortcomings we're aware of in this version of the patchset. The
>> main goal of this RFC to get feedback on the types of core
>> functionality we would need in an agent of this sort, as well as
>> feedback on the general approach/architecture implemented here. Any
>> feedback is greatly appreciated however.
>>
>> To start off this discussion, there have been some recent posts about
>> how much an agent of this sort overlaps with the goals of the Matahari
>> project (https://fedorahosted.org/matahari/). While both of these
>> approaches are at least *feasible*, our use cases require
>
>
>> the ability to deploy to guests which may not support virtio-serial,
>> which currently rules Matahari out.
>
> Possibly there has been some miscommunication, Matahari does not require
> virtio-serial.
>
> It will be possible to configure Matahari to use virtio-serial if it
> exists, but like Virtproxy it can also be used over a regular IP network
> (yes, its transparent to clients too).
>

Sorry, I'm aware of this but wasn't very clear here. I was speaking in 
the context of our cloud, or other environments where there isn't any 
network access between the host and the guest. This essentially leaves 
virtio-serial and isa-serial, and a large number of our guests don't 
support the former.

> -- Andrew
>