From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jamie Lokier Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] virtio-serial: A guest <-> host interface for simple communication Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:50:02 +0100 Message-ID: <20090624175002.GJ14121@shareable.org> References: <1245760953-32139-1-git-send-email-amit.shah@redhat.com> <20090624164049.GE14121@shareable.org> <20090624170632.GA24285@amit-x200.redhat.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org, qemu-devel@nongnu.org, kvm@vger.kernel.org To: Amit Shah Return-path: Received: from mail2.shareable.org ([80.68.89.115]:33807 "EHLO mail2.shareable.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753358AbZFXRuH (ORCPT ); Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:50:07 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20090624170632.GA24285@amit-x200.redhat.com> Sender: kvm-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Amit Shah wrote: > On (Wed) Jun 24 2009 [17:40:49], Jamie Lokier wrote: > > Amit Shah wrote: > > > A few sample uses for a vmchannel are to share the host and guest > > > clipboards (to allow copy/paste between a host and a guest), to > > > lock the screen of the guest session when the vnc viewer is closed, > > > to find out which applications are installed on a guest OS even when > > > the guest is powered down (using virt-inspector) and so on. > > > > Those all look like useful features. > > > > Can you run an application to provide those features on a guest which > > _doesn't_ have a vmchannel/virtio-serial support in the kernel? > > > > Or will it be restricted only to guests which have QEMU-specific > > support in their kernel? > > libguestfs currently uses the -net user based vmchannel interface that > exists in current qemu. That doesn't need a kernel that doesn't have > support for virtio-serial. That's great! If that works fine, and guest apps/libraries are using that as a fallback anyway, what benefit do they get from switching to virtio-serial when they detect that instead, given they still have code for the -net method? Is the plan to remove -net user based support from libguestfs? Is virtio-serial significantly simpler to use? -- Jamie