Re: [PATCH/RFC 7/9] Virtual network guest device driver

Rusty Russell
2007-05-17T23:34:08Z

On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 11:13 -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Rusty Russell wrote:
> > I think shared memory is an obvious start, but it's not enough for
> > inter-guest where they can't freely access each other's memory. So you
> > really want a ring-buffer of descriptors with a hypervisor-assist to say
> > "read/write this into the memory referred to by that descriptor".
>
> I think this is getting a little ahead of ourselves. An example of this
> idea is pretty straight-forward but it gets more complicated when trying
> to support the existing memory sharing mechanisms on various
> hypervisors. There are a few cases to consider:

To clarify, I'm not overly interested in existing mechanisms. I'm first
trying for something sane from a Linux driver POV, then see if it can be
implemented in terms of legacy systems.

This reflects my belief that we will see more virtualization solutions
in the medium term, so it's reasonable to look at a new system.

Cheers,
Rusty.