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

Eric Van Hensbergen
2007-05-22T01:34:16Z

On 5/21/07, Anthony Liguori <anthony-rdkfGonbjUSkNkDKm+mE6A@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> ron minnich wrote:
> > OK, so what are we doing here? We're using a PCI abstraction, as a
> > common abstraction,which is not common really, because we don't have a
> > common abstraction? So we describe all these non-pci resources with a
> > pci abstraction?
> >
>
> No. You're confusing PV device discovery with the actual paravirtual
> transport.

In a PV environment why not just pass an initial cookie/hash/whatever
as a command-line argument/register/memory-space to the underlying
kernel? The presence of such a kernel argument would suggest the
existence of a hypercall interface or other such mechanism to "attach"
to the initial transport(s). Command-line arguments may be a bit too
linux-centric to Ron's taste, but if we are going to chose something
arbitrary like PCI, I'd prefer we chose something a bit more
straightforward to interact with instead of doing crazy ritual dances
to extract what should be straightforward information. I really don't
want to have integrate PCI parsing into my testOS/libOS kernels.

-eric