Re: [Qemu-devel] virtio-serial: A guest <-> host interface for simple communication

Daniel P. Berrange
2009-06-23T14:59:39Z

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 01:55:52PM +0100, Paul Brook wrote:
> > Here are two patches. One implements a virtio-serial device in qemu
> > and the other is the driver for a guest kernel.
>
> So I'll ask again. Why is this separate from virtio-console?

In the guest I wouldn't want virtio-serial devices to be mixed up with
the virtio-console device. virtio-console has nice clear usecase of
being an interactive console, and as such the guest OS can & should
automatically start a mingetty/agetty process on any virtio-console
device it finds. If we use virtio-console for data channels to, then
guest config becomes much harder todo automatically.

By all means share underlying code/infrastructure where appropriate,
but they must ultimately appear as clearly separate devices IMHO

Daniel
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